Disability Works

A cultural history of disability, performance, and work in the modern United States

In 1967, the US government funded the National Theatre of the Deaf, a groundbreaking rehabilitation initiative employing deaf actors. This project aligned with the postwar belief that transforming bodies, minds, aesthetics, and institutions could liberate disabled Americans from economic reliance on the state, and demonstrated the growing optimism that performance could provide job opportunities for people with disabilities.

Disability Works offers an original cultural history of disability and performance in modern America, exploring rehabilitation’s competing legacies. The book highlights an unexpected alliance of rehabilitation professionals, deaf teachers, policy makers, disability activists, queer artists, and religious leaders who championed performance’s rehabilitative potential. At the same time, some disabled artists imagined a different political itinerary for theatrical practice. Rather than acquiescing to the terms of productive citizenship, these artists recuperated rehabilitation as a creative resource for imagining and building a world beyond work. Using previously unexplored archives, Disability Works portrays the history of disabled Americans’ performance labor as both a national aspiration and a national problem. The book reveals how disabled artists and activists ingeniously used rehabilitative resources to fuel their performance practices, breaking free from the grasp of rehabilitation and fostering more just institutions.

From state-funded “sign-mime” to Black modern dance, community theatre to Stanislavskian actor training, speculative activism to epistolary performance, Disability Works recovers an expansive repertoire of aesthetic and infrastructural investigations into the terms of how disability works in modern American culture.

Patrick McKelvey is Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre Arts at University of PittsburghPatrick McKelvey is Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre Arts at University of Pittsburgh

McKelvey takes disability history in a radically new direction by placing theater at the heart of U.S. disability politics since 1960. Tracing the lives and afterlives of government funding for disability arts, Disability Works brilliantly—and unexpectedly—calls attention to performance as a tool of vocational rehabilitation. As the government has tried to put disabled artists to work, telling them how to act, those artists have subverted the rehabilitative approach to disability. From the National Theatre of the Deaf to Alvin Ailey’s American Dance Theater, McKelvey brings new archives, new works, and new crip aesthetics (such as “bureaucratic drag”) to the field of disability studies.

Disability Works puts before us histories that will quickly become indispensable for scholars and general readers, narrating how vibrant queercrip imaginaries have long looked beyond rehabilitation and indeed beyond work, imagining and performing ways of being-in-common that speak back to compulsory able-bodiedness. The histories that McKelvey documents provide us alternative, critically queer, and generatively disabled maps for moving forward. The demands of productive citizenship have rarely been felt as strongly as they are at this moment. In this context, the crip imagination that the book documents is a refreshing reminder that another world is possible.