Natalia Pamula, Work-in-progress (a book chapter draft)
This chapter analyzes a range of literary texts (non-fiction, young adult literature, disability memoirs) to examine representations of disability futures in post-socialist Poland. Although produced over the span of twenty-six years (1995–2021), these futures are quite uniform in that they are privatized and, more specifically, familialized. A disabled future is secured only by a family and only within a family. Polish post-1989 literary texts show that the family is the only place that can guarantee a future for a disabled subject. Without a family or a mother, a disabled subject is utterly alone, whereas to live as the mother of a child with disability is to never be alone. As a result, these texts testify to the binding of the bodies and futures of a mother and her disabled child. In other words, in post-1989 Polish literature, a disabled child is imagined as a mother’s child. The birth of a disabled child oftentimes signals the end of a mother’s normatively understood future. Or, to put it differently, a mother’s future becomes intimately interwoven and attached to her disabled child’s future. These bindings of bodies and futures generate what I call a “violent intimacy” between a mother and her disabled child.
BIO: Natalia Pamula is an assistant professor at the American Studies Center at the U of Warsaw. She works on disability discourses and representations in Polish socialist and post-socialist culture. Her work has appeared in Aspasia, East European Politics and Societies and Cultures, and Canadian Slavonic Papers.
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