EXTRAORDINARY BODIES IN LIVIU REBREANUʼS ION. A READING THROUGH THE LENS OF DISABILITY STUDIES

In this essay, I would like to share some thoughts on the possible added value of reading Liviu Rebreanu's novel Ion (1920) through the lens of so-called "Disability Studies".Disability Studies is a social sciences and humanities academic field that emerged in the American academia in the 1990s.Before, it was mainly the practical sciences focusing on concrete interventions that would favor individuals with impairments who had limited access to societal opportunities and resources 1 .Activists demanded attention to the topic.They admitted that the notion of "disability" functioned as a kind of container, having stemmed mainly from the need to construct a collective identity "to make change possible, to break down discrimination in jobs, transport, in people's attitudes generally" as claimed by author Peter White, who was blind himself.Otherwise, he could wonder what makes him comparable to a man in a wheelchair and ask himself "whether putting me into a disabled category really makes much sense" 2 .Meanwhile, researchers using the advanced academic approach of Cultural or Critical Disability Studies 3 emphasize the fact that "impairment is a common 1 I refer here to the emerging rehabilitation sciences in the historical context of the 1970s and 1980s.The study and discussion of disability, also in scientific terms as a whole, have a much longer history in many different individual disciplines, which cannot be discussed in detail here (for an overview, see Anne Waldschmidt, Disability Studies zur Einfhrung, Hamburg, Junius Hamburg, 2020, pp.17-20).However, it should be remembered that "interventions" did take place earlier in the opposite direction -e.g., in the context of nationalistic "Vlkerkunde" and eugenics, resulting, as a catastrophic climax, in the de facto genocide of people who were physically or mentally impaired, euphemistically called "euthanasia", in the German Third Reich.