Translation, Reproduction, and Disfigurement: The Queer-Crip Ethic of Florio’s <i>Essays</i>

This article discusses the intersection between reproduction, futurity, and disability in the paratexts of early modern books. In their introductions and dedications, early modern books often use reproductive metaphors, describing an author’s book as their child. These metaphors express cultural attitudes toward sexuality, reproduction, and futurity. Many such metaphors in the era suggest that the book in question might be metaphorically maimed or disfigured: while this rhetoric could certainly be ableist, reproductive metaphors were not always used to further a fantasy of a hetero-able-bodied futurity. Using sexuality studies and disability studies as lenses through which to analyze how bodies’ sexual and reproductive potentials are imagined by social and political discourse, this article focuses on John Florio’s 1603 English translation of Michel de Montaigne’s Essays, in which Florio describes translation as inherently defective and disfiguring, to argue that Florio’s paratexts build on the content of Montaigne’s Essays to queer and crip the heteronormative and ableist fantasy of producing only able-bodied (book) children who normatively inherit their (author) parents’ legacies and carry these legacies into a future that mirrors the present. Florio’s description of translation resonates with Montaigne’s own capacious understanding of sexuality, bodily variance, and futurity, as Florio’s translation invites its English readers into a queer-crip orientation to the centrality of disability in community. This article invites further consideration of book production and authorial legacy as frameworks in which writers, editors, and readers negotiated expectations for reproduction, futurity, and disability.