Naples, Bodies of Disability, and Radical Creativity

This dissertation explores how creative texts theorize disability through corporealized portrayals of the city of Naples and through interactions of the city’s inhabitants. Within a framework of feminism and disability studies, I analyze 19th–21st-century texts authored by Neapolitan women that contribute to critical perspectives on disability. Their work offers readers a city and characters oppressed in society: poor, queer, disabled, and female, subjected to hierarchical systems that value wealth, strength, and masculinity. I argue that incorporating disability challenges patriarchal and capitalist structures at play. Representations of disability in these works reveal a traditional narrative about Naples as a city of victims, and more radical visions in which the marginalized re-construct the city from their perspectives as a city where disability does not equal victimization, diverse subjectivities intra-act to create the city, and creativity leads to empowerment.