"The Seriously Injured of Our Civic Life": Imagining Disabled Collectivity in Depression-Era Crip Modernisms

Abstract

This essay explores how Depression-era cultural production employed a "crip modernism" to render disability as a consciously emerging social, legal, and medical class. Here, I examine modernist engagements with the shifting category of disability, specifically Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) and the films Freaks (1932) and Beggars in Ermine (1934). I draw these texts together to argue that, in line with a Depression-era interest in the marginalized, they utilize formal experimentation to disrupt notions of disability as an individualized phenomenon belonging merely to the realm of medical expertise. Instead, they register the form of a burgeoning, activist disability collectivity.