Chapter 9 Disability and Its Doubles: The Conflicting Discourses of Disability in Susan Nussbaum’s No One as Nasty
In: Disability and Dissensus: Strategies of Disability Representation and Inclusion in Contemporary CultureSearch for other papers by Edyta Lorek-Jezińska in
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Abstract
The chapter examines the complex implications that the play No One as Nasty by an American playwright, Susan Nussbaum has for making sense of disability. Being the last play in the anthology Beyond Victims and Villains, published in 2006 and written from the post-Independent Living Movement perspective, No One as Nasty presents a story of a female character, who – in institutional terms – seems to enjoy full rights of an independent citizen aided by personal assistants and drivers to realize the ideals of independence. With part of her experience presented in almost naturalistic detail and part in surrealistic fantasy, Nussbaum’s heroine bounces between the absolute denial of disability and its difference, and an attempt at mapping it against other forms of social, cultural, racial, and sexual disabilities and exclusions. The play’s contradictions are addressed through the concepts and critical readings of medical and moral discourses and their exclusionary practices related to the narratives of overcoming and pity, as well as through the notions of complex embodiment and non-docility of the body of the quadriplegic protagonist who engages – in problematic ways – personal assistants in her self-styling performance.