Writing with Steel Joints: Problematizing the Prosthesis in Literary Studies

Characterized by mass industrial development, the nineteenth century saw both the technological advancement, and the cultural aestheticization of the prosthetic limb. In contemporary disability scholarship the “narrative prosthesis” addresses the literary representation of non-normative bodies, often informed by such historical patterns. Again, the prosthesis requests recontextualization; brought into intersectional spaces, not only of disability justice but of literary consciousness, this presentation asks: what does it mean to write of a prosthesis? To write as a prosthesis? How might the prosthesis be employed as an inherently interdisciplinary term that maps multiple networks of regeneration/degeneration across the demarcations of disability, class, race, gender, and sexuality? Or can the prosthesis comprise a methodology for navigating these plateaus? While these questions may not yet have answers, Mackenzie’s presentation will initiate this discussion by reading from the perspective of a writer, complicating both literature from the nineteenth century and its inheritances in contemporary speculative fiction.

Mackenzie Ashcroft (she/her) is an MA student in English Literature and Language at the University of British Columbia. She earned her BA Honours in English, with an embedded certificate in creative writing, from the University of Calgary. Mackenzie’s current research, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, examines the place of disabled bodies and voices in Victorian Literature, their relationships to technology and their representations in contemporary speculative fiction genres.