"Tales Told by Empty Sleeves: Disability, Mendicancy, and Civil War Life Writing"

We will be workshopping Jean Franzino's article draft, entitled "Tales Told by Empty Sleeves: Disability, Mendicancy, and Civil War Life Writing." This paper considers how texts written or sold by disabled Civil War veterans for their economic support intervened in representational struggles over disability in the postbellum United States. Mendicant texts draw upon but revise the treatment of disability in other popular culture representations of “empty sleeves” and in U.S. pension law. As they challenge both the assumption of the sentimental reintegration of the wounded veteran into the individual and national family and the conception of disability as a neatly administrable category, they offer instead a different vision: that of disability as a dynamic phenomenon whose full meaning is only determined by interpersonal relationships. At the same time, the fact that a number of narrators chose to stretch or evade the truth in their narratives points to what David Serlin has termed “hierarchies of disability,” wherein the cultural inclusion of some forms of disability merely tightens the criteria of “worthiness” for all disabled people. An understudied but fraught genre of disability life writing before the twentieth century, Civil War mendicant texts raise questions about the relationship between disability and narrative, the character of Civil War writing, and the stakes of truthfulness in life writing by marginalized subjects.

To RSVP and receive a copy of the pre-circulated paper, please email Ani Bezirdzhyan (abezirdz@umich.edu).

This event is co-sponsored by the Disability Studies Rackham Interdisciplinary Workshop (RIW) group.