What Can A Pandemic Offer Disabled People?: Vulnerable Subjects, Crip Community, And Archaeological Narrative

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Disability Wisdom for the Covid-19 Pandemic" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted that Disabled people are not specially adapted to pandemic lifestyles, and in fact are disproportionately at risk in the contemporary pandemic landscape. In medieval Europe, broadly, a series of Yersinia (Black Death) infections transformed the social landscape. Prior to the Black Death, physical impairments were associated with healing miracles and Christian expressions of caritas. In the years after these pandemic, and epidemic-level infections, physical impairment—and ultimately disability—were associated with poverty, violence, and a bad moral character. Using art historical and archival evidence, I suggest that pandemics are apparatuses of separation—not only based on their capacity to physically isolate people through quarantine, but also in their capacity to magnify and physically inscribe existing inequalities. Drawing on queer and crip theories, I reconceptualize a crip kinship network that dissolves temporal boundaries in order to take up the question: What can a pandemic offer Disabled people?

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2021   •
• Disability Wisdom for the Covid-19 Pandemic

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology