Date of Award

Spring 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Spanish and Portuguese

First Advisor

Valis, Noël

Abstract

In my dissertation, I examine the role of disability, diagnosis, and cure in modern and contemporary Spanish novels. In the first three chapters, I show how authors of the late 19th and early 20th century used disability’s relationship to race, gender, and social class to question exclusionary social norms. I analyze critiques of industrialization in Galdós’s Marianela (1878) and Blasco Ibáñez’s Del vivir (1904); examine portrayals of leprosy in Galdós’s Misericordia (1897), Pardo Bazán’s La prueba (1890), Miró’s Del vivir (1904) and El obispo leproso (1926), and Hoyos y Vinent’s El monstruo (1915); and explore connections between disability, sexuality, and medical case histories in Hernández-Catá’s El ángel de Sodoma (1928), de Burgos’s Quiero vivir mi vida (1931), and Retana’s A Sodoma en tren botijo (1933). Narrators’ and characters’ reactions to diagnosis and cure suggest that medicine can enable social control, or facilitate enlightenment and resistance. Moreover, disability carries aesthetic implications in many novels. It shifts the textual status quo to produce unsatisfying conclusions, celebrate deviance, or alter descriptive and narrative styles. In the final chapter, I follow the transformation of medical discourses, cure, and normalization to contemporary Spain. The film Yo, también (2009) and Cristina Morales’s novel Lectura fácil (2018) reveal that medical models of disability and normalization still underlie attempts at inclusion. While diagnoses and treatments have changed, disability retains an antinormative position that challenges political and stylistic norms, affecting the novel’s ethics and aesthetics.

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