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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 October 2022
Contributing to modern theology's attention to diverse embodiments and particular histories, this paper brings the poetry of the book of Job into dialogue with new voices: modern poets of disability, especially women. Traditional theological reflections on suffering and disability often turn to Job, although Job's words and the text itself resist easy conclusions. Modern poets of disability reveal surprising similarities with Job, as both seek to reject the meaning others ascribe to their bodies. Comparing the poets of disability to Job reveals how disabling change to the body is experienced as exile and as a new experience requiring new language. The unchanged, able-bodied audience rejects the new insights of the poet, exposing the conflicts between the interpretations that communities privilege and those they exclude. Elements of a constructive theology of disability are found in the way poets of disability creatively reconfigure the changing relationships among body, words, community, and God.
1 All biblical references are from: Michael Coogan et al., eds., The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha: New Revised Standard Version, 5th edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).
2 Gustavo Gutiérrez, On Job: God-Talk and The Suffering of The Innocent, trans. Matthew J. O'Connell (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1998), xviii; Johann Baptist Metz, “Theology as Theodicy?,” in A Passion for God: The Mystical-Political Dimension of Christianity, trans. J. Matthew Ashley (New York: Paulist Press, 1998), 54.
3 Gutiérrez, On Job, 1.
4 Vento, Johann M., “Violence, Trauma, and Resistance: A Feminist Appraisal of Metz's Mysticism of Suffering unto God,” Horizons 29, no. 1 (2002): 7, 10CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 Anne Kaier, “River Creature,” in Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability, ed. Jennifer Bartlett, Sheila Black, and Michael Northen (El Paso, TX: Cinco Puntos Press, 2011), 236.
6 Jennifer Bartlett, Sheila Black, and Michael Northen, eds., Beauty Is a Verb.
7 Deborah Beth Creamer, Disability and Christian Theology Embodied Limits and Constructive Possibilities (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 55.
8 Nancy L. Eiesland, The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1994), 24.
9 Betcher, Sharon V., “Becoming Flesh of My Flesh: Feminist and Disability Theologies on the Edge of Posthumanist Discourse,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 26, no. 2 (2010): 110CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 Jay Timothy Dolmage, Disability Rhetoric (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2014). Lennard Davis discusses how modern understandings of disability developed in response to the way statistics came to define “the normal,” in, Lennard Davis, “Introduction: Normality, Power, and Culture,” in The Disability Studies Reader, ed. Lennard Davis (New York: Routledge, 2013), 1–2. Douglas Baynton explores how the concept of disability was used to define who did and did not count as potential citizens in Douglas C. Baynton, Defectives in the Land: Disability and Immigration in the Age of Eugenics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2016). Susan Schweik discusses how the concept of disability as “disgusting” and “ugly” was used in domestic laws to remove anyone “diseased, maimed, mutilated, or in any way deformed, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object” off the public streets. Susan M. Schweik, The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 1.
11 Iozzio, Mary Jo, “Thinking about Disabilities with Justice, Liberation, and Mercy,” Horizons 36, no. 1 (2009): 47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
12 Raphael, Rebecca, “Things Too Wonderful: A Disabled Reading of Job,” Perspectives in Religious Studies 31, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 401Google Scholar.
13 Magdalene, F. Rachel, “The ANE Legal Origins of Impairment as Theological Disability and the Book of Job,” Perspectives in Religious Studies 34, no. 1 (2007): 26Google Scholar.
14 Amos Yong, “Job and the Redemption of Monstrosity,” in The Bible, Disability, and The Church: A New Vision of the People of God (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, 2011), 38.
15 Emily Arndt, Demanding Our Attention: The Hebrew Bible as a Source for Christian Ethics (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, 2011), 176.
16 Arndt, Demanding Our Attention, 86–87, 189.
17 Job's “disability” experience has a sudden and unexpected onset, is physically debilitating, and is visible as a major affliction to others. Job first “fell on the ground” in response to the loss of all his livestock, servants, and children (Job 1:20). Categories of injuries are suggested when the Satan seeks to afflict Job in “his bone and his flesh” (Job 2:3), and then inflicts “loathsome sores on Job from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head” (Job 2:7). At this point, Job is described on the ground: “Job took a potsherd with which to scrape himself, and sat among the ashes” (Job 2:8). He is not described as moving from this position. The change to his bodily status is negative—“loathsome”—to Job and to others (Job 2:7, 19:17). Once Job begins to speak in poetry, he expresses in detail his experience as an unrelenting form of disruption: “My inward parts are in turmoil, and are never still” (Job 30:27).
18 Katherine J. Dell explores his malady in detail, noting that along with the medical condition he suffered also from “mental torment” and “social ostracization,” and agrees with Jeremy Schipper about the lack of a clear story of healing. Dell, Katharine J., “What Was Job's Malady?,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 41, no. 1 (September 2016): 62–65, 77, https://doi.org/10.1177/0309089216628418CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schipper, Jeremy, “Healing and Silence in the Epilogue of Job,” Word & World 30, no. 1 (2010): 22Google Scholar.
19 Newsom uses the work of Mikhail Bakhtin to define a polyphonic text as having three distinctive characteristics. “(1) it embodies a dialogic sense of truth; (2) the author's position, although represented in the text, is not privileged; and (3) the polyphonic text ends without finalizing closure.” Carol A. Newsom, The Book of Job: A Contest of Moral Imaginations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 17, 21.
20 Raphael mentions her disability in her studies of Job, but she describes her experience further here: Rebecca Raphael, “He Who Has Ears to Hear,” Religious Studies News, May 2005, http://rsnonline.org/indexd987.html?option=com_content&view=article&id=528&Itemid=612.
21 Newsom, The Book of Job, 58.
22 Dell describes Job's sense of being “fenced in” by God as “almost an irrational response from someone in mental torment.” Dell, “What Was Job's Malady?,” 67.
23 Neil Marcus, “Disabled Country,” in Petra Kuppers, Neil Marcus, and Lisa Steichmann, Cripple Poetics: A Love Story (Ypsilanti, MI: Homofactus Press, 2008), 115.
24 Marcus, “Disabled Country,” 115.
25 Marcus, “Disabled Country,” 115.
26 Marcus, “Disabled Country,” 115.
27 Sheila Black, “What You Mourn,” 212.
28 Black, “What You Mourn,” 212.
29 Black, “What You Mourn,” 212.
30 A wide range of modern theologians emphasize the significance of Job's effort to communicate, in contrast to a developed theodicy. Metz, for example, emphasizes Job's language of suffering, crisis, affliction, radical danger, complaint, and grievance as a language of prayer, not an argument. Metz, “Theology as Theodicy?” 55. David Burrell credits Job for speaking “to” God rather than “about” God. David B. Burrell, Deconstructing Theodicy: Why Job Has Nothing to Say to the Puzzle of Suffering (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2008), 124. Raphael argues that “Rather than focusing on theodicy (the able-bodied friends’ project), let us attend to Job's language of physical suffering, dismemberment, and monstrosity.” Raphael, “Things Too Wonderful,” 402.
31 Newsom, The Book of Job, 130.
32 Raphael, “Things Too Wonderful,” 402.
33 Newsom, The Book of Job, 131.
34 Job's statement seeking strangling can be translated as “my throat would choose strangling [and I would choose] death rather than my bones” because the words for “throat” and “bones” are words that identify the self. Newsom, The Book of Job, 135.
35 Karen Fiser, Words Like Fate and Pain (Cambridge, MA: Zoland Books, 1992).
36 Fiser, Words Like Fate and Pain, 8.
37 Fiser, Words Like Fate and Pain, 8.
38 Fiser, Words Like Fate and Pain, 8.
39 Fiser, “Across the Border,” in Words Like Fate and Pain, 3.
40 Fiser, “Pointing to the Place of the Pain,” in Words Like Fate and Pain, 12.
41 Fiser, “Pointing to the Place of the Pain,” in Words Like Fate and Pain, 12.
42 Fiser, “The Problem of Personal Identity,” in Words Like Fate and Pain, 50–51.
43 Fiser, “The Problem of Personal Identity,” in Words Like Fate and Pain, 50.
44 Fiser, “The Problem of Personal Identity,” in Words Like Fate and Pain, 51.
45 Newsom's description does seem to assume a model like Job's pain, not a form of chronic pain that is diachronic with ebbs and flows to the urgency. Newsom, The Book of Job, 135.
46 Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2014), 24.
47 Vento, “Violence, Trauma, and Resistance,” 15.
48 Newsom, The Book of Job, 134.
49 Newsom, The Book of Job, 134.
50 Dell, “What Was Job's Malady?,” 69–70.
51 Newsom, The Book of Job, 124.
52 Magdalene, “The ANE Legal Origins of Impairment as Theological Disability and the Book of Job,” 57.
53 Magdalene, “The ANE Legal Origins of Impairment as Theological Disability and the Book of Job,” 52.
54 Richard Parry, “Episteme and Techne,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Winter 2021, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2021), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2021/entries/episteme-techne/.
55 Laura Hershey, “Getting Comfortable,” in Beauty Is a Verb, 131–32.
56 Hershey, “Telling,” in Beauty Is a Verb, 134–35.
57 Many disability scholars offer accounts of the different “myths” or “rhetoric” at work, guiding assumptions about disability. The pity myth is regularly discussed, such as here, Dolmage, Disability Rhetoric, 40–41.
58 Hershey, “Telling,” 134–35.
59 Newsom, The Book of Job, 134.
60 Newsom, The Book of Job, 134.
61 Job speaks in chapter 27, much like the earlier chapters, whereas chapter 28 reflects a wisdom poem describing the search for knowledge. My focus here follows chapters 29 through 31.
62 Newsom disagrees with scholars who think that a different author composed Job's speeches in these chapters; she suggests they are “a new experiment with the resources of language.” Newsom, The Book of Job, 184–85.
63 Newsom, The Book of Job, 188.
64 Magdalene, “The ANE Legal Origins of Impairment as Theological Disability and the Book of Job,” 53.
65 Newsom, The Book of Job, 197.
66 Kirk Patston, “Disability Discrimination in the Book of Job,” in Theology and the Experience of Disability: Interdisciplinary Perspectives from Voices Down Under, ed. Andrew Picard and Myk Habets (New York: Routledge, 2016), 43.
67 Schipper, “Healing and Silence in the Epilogue of Job,” 20; Dell, “What Was Job's Malady?,” 72–75.
68 Raphael, “Things Too Wonderful,” 411.
69 Newsom, The Book of Job, 198.
70 Newsom, The Book of Job, 201.
71 Newsom, The Book of Job, 202.
72 Magdalene disagrees that Elihu is a later insertion, arguing Elihu's accusation of blasphemy against Job (key to the Satan's original charge) is central to the legal issues of the text. Magdalene, “The ANE Legal Origins of Impairment as Theological Disability and the Book of Job,” 54.
73 Lynn Manning, “The Magic Wand,” in Staring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside Out, ed. Kenny Fries (New York: Penguin Books, 1997), 163.
74 Leroy F. Moore Jr., 2018 Invisible Man (Captioned) by Leroy F Moore Jr.—YouTube, Performance, February 26, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJht0W-TBEc.
75 Arndt, Demanding Our Attention, 189.
76 Katerina Tsiokou, “Body Politics and Disability: Negotiating Subjectivity and Embodiment in Disability Poetry,” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 11, no. 2 (May 2017): 207, https://doi.org/10.3828/jlcds.2017.15.
77 Raphael argues that the either/or framework must be rejected. Raphael, “Things Too Wonderful,” 402–03.
78 Newsom, The Book of Job, 235.
79 Raphael, “Things Too Wonderful,” 423; emphasis mine.
80 Frances Sage, “Vassar Miller: Modern Mystic,” in Heart's Intention: On the Poetry of Vasser Miller, ed. Stephen Ford Brown (Houston, TX: Ford-Brown, 1988), 20.
81 Thompson, Janice A., “Challenging Interpretations of Disability and Incarnation in Vassar Miller's Poetry of Connection,” Christianity & Literature 70, no. 4 (December 2021): 1–20Google Scholar.
82 “Sick Dog,” in Vassar Miller, If I Had Wheels or Love: Collected Poems of Vassar Miller (Dallas, TX: Southern Methodist University Press, 1991), 154.
83 Miller, “Speculation,” in If I Had Wheels or Love, 144.
84 Miller, “Speculation,” in If I Had Wheels or Love, 144.
85 Miller, “The One Thing Needful,” in If I Had Wheels or Love, 114–15.
86 Newsom, The Book of Job, 240.
87 Newsom, The Book of Job, 246–47.
88 Miller, “Spastics,” in If I Had Wheels or Love, 207.
89 Miller, “On the Examination Table,” in If I Had Wheels or Love, 206.
90 Miller, “On the Examination Table,” in If I Had Wheels or Love, 206.
91 Miller, “Approaching Nada,” in If I Had Wheels or Love, 231.
92 Miller, “Pigself,” in If I Had Wheels or Love, 273.
93 Newsom, The Book of Job, 249.
94 Newsom, The Book of Job, 250–51.
95 Newsom, The Book of Job, 253–55.
96 Newsom, The Book of Job, 256.
97 Raphael, “Things Too Wonderful,” 421.
98 Raphael, “Things Too Wonderful,” 421.
99 Raphael, “Things Too Wonderful,” 424.
100 See, for example, Barclay, Jenifer L., “Bad Breeders and Monstrosities: Racializing Childlessness and Congenital Disabilities in Slavery and Freedom,” Slavery & Abolition 38, no. 2 (April 3, 2017): 287–302, https://doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2017.1316966CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
101 Miller, “Introduction to a Poetry Reading,” in If I Had Wheels or Love, 185.
102 Tsiokou, “Body Politics and Disability,” 207.
103 Doak, Mary, “Sex, Race, and Culture: Constructing Theological Anthropology for the Twenty-First Century,” Theological Studies 80, no. 3 (September 2019): 510, https://doi.org/10.1177/0040563919856365CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
104 Nathan Esala, “Towards Contextualizing ‘Contextual Bible Study’ among the Bikɔɔm Peoples in Ghana,” Journal of Theology for Southern Africa 154 (March 2016): 114.
105 Titchkosky, Tanya, “Life with Dead Metaphors,” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 9, no. 1 (January 2015): 9, https://doi.org/10.3828/jlcds.2015.1CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
106 Fries observes “connection” as a common theme in all pieces in his collection. Kenny Fries, Staring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside Out (New York: Penguin Putnam, 1997), 3.
107 Scheuer, Christina, “Bodily Compositions: The Disability Poetics of Karen Fiser and Laurie Clements Lambeth,” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 5, no. 2 (January 2011): 162, https://doi.org/10.3828/jlcds.2011.13CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
108 Laurie Clements Lambeth, “Reshaping the Outline,” in Beauty Is a Verb, 175.
109 Karla Hammond, “An Interview with Vassar Miller,” in Heart's Invention: On the Poetry of Vassar Miller, ed. Stephen Ford Brown (Houston, TX: Ford-Brown, 1988), 38.
110 Titchkosky, “Life with Dead Metaphors,” 6.
111 Doak, “Sex, Race, and Culture,” 522.
112 See Brian Brock, for example, who writes for his son: Brian R. Brock, Wondrously Wounded: Theology, Disability, and the Body of Christ (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2020). Thomas E. Reynolds also writes for his son: Thomas E. Reynolds, Vulnerable Communion: A Theology of Disability and Hospitality (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2008).
113 Arndt, Demanding Our Attention, 176.