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Kellie Robertson (rescheduled): "Bawds and ABAWDs: Able Bodies in Historical Perspective"

March 31, 2015

5:00 PM

Hillel House Multipurpose Room (101)

Julie Cline

Robertson teaches medieval literature and intellectual history at the University of Maryland. She is the author of "The Laborer’s Two Bodies: Labor and the ‘Work’ of the Text in Medieval Britain, 1350-1500" and co-editor of a collection of essays entitled "The Middle Ages at Work: Practicing Labor in Late Medieval England." Her current book project is entitled "Nature Speaks: Medieval Literature and Aristotelian Natural Philosophy."

In the last decade, Disability Studies has begun the genealogical work of uncovering how bodily impairment has historically shaped cultural norms. As this history of disability takes shape, however, there remains to be written the history of ability. What does it mean to be called “able-bodied?” Who gets to decide? To what uses is this designation put?

This history is largely that of the working poor, those whose bodies have been subject to emphatic scrutiny and regulation in the name of multiple common goods. Beginning in mid-fourteenth century England, when this category first became the object of national legislation, this paper looks at the early history of how and why “able-bodied” became a category; it then documents the continuing effects of these early cultural and legal formations, tracing their influence up through current U.S. state policy.