Introduction

Summary

The purpose of Disabled Bodies in Early Modern Spanish Literature: Prostitutes, Aging Women and Saints is to examine, from the perspective of feminist disability theories, the concepts and roles of women in selected Spanish discourses and literary texts from the late fifteenth to the seventeenth century. My central argument is that the traditional notions and segregation of female bodies, considered imperfect and inferior in comparison to the prototype of the corporeal male, constitute a major paradigm of disability in the period. The female body, as with the disabled body, has been stigmatized, subjugated and deprived of freedom and opportunities. In the Western conceptualization, women and the disabled symbolize imperfection, corruption, impurity and, ultimately, human vulnerability.

Disability Studies is an area of intellectual inquiry that originated in the social sciences and in political movements from the 1970s and that has since been adopted by the humanities. It is interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary in nature, with practical social and political ends: to investigate, uncover and denounce constructions of concepts and institutional barriers that have traditionally resulted in the segregation of individuals that do not conform to bodily ideals. The political movement resulted in the social awareness of injustice leading to the establishment of various laws and initiatives. In the theoretical realm, such awareness highlighted the need to develop analytical methods of study, as matters pertinent to the field became an object of scholarly investigation.

Disability Studies utilizes a variety of methodologies to investigate specific aspects of disability, such as perceptions of the body, social justice and identity politics. The most influential paradigm in this discipline has been the “social model of disability,” developed in England in 1976 by a group of disabled activists with a Marxist perspective, the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS). The social model presents an alternative to the conventional ways of explaining disability as an individual tragedy or curse, or as a medical problem that needs to be cured or repaired, proposing a distinction between disability (as social exclusion) and impairment (as physical limitation), and arguing that disabled people are politically oppressed.