Layne Parish Craig | Modernism / Modernity Print+

Layne Parish Craig is a faculty member in the English Department at Texas Christian University. She is the author of When Sex Changed: Birth Control and Literature Between the World Wars (Rutgers University Press, 2013) and of numerous articles on modernist and WWI-era literary writing, frequently focusing on representations of sexuality and reproduction in literature. Her teaching and research focus include literatures of the twentieth century, gender and sexuality studies, and the medical humanities.

Contributions

#DisabilityToo: Bringing Disability into a Modernist #MeToo Moment

In the original “Reading The Waste Land with the #MeToo Generation” Modernism/modernity cluster, Erin Templeton suggests an imbrication of gender and mental disability foundational to the creation of The Waste Land through her analysis of Vivien Eliot’s contributions to “A Game of Chess.”[1] Templeton observes that as Eliot’s incorporated Vivien’s marginal notes, the poem came to “[feature] material traces left by an actual female hand.” More specifically, though, such traces are left by a disabled female hand, the hand of a reader and collaborator for whom experiences of gender, sexuality, and mental and physical health were inextricably linked. Following on Templeton’s work of making visible the corporeality of women as characters and creators in modernist literature, this essay applies a #MeToo framework to canonical modernist narratives in which sexual abuse and disability collide.