‘Sumpin wrong inside him’: Exploring the cripistemologies and degenerates in Oklahoma!

Scholars have consistently pointed to Jud Fry’s outer markings of race and ethnicity to explain his marginal status in Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s 1943 smash-hit musical Oklahoma! Most, however, have simultaneously gestured towards an assumed but undertheorized mental impairment – what the character Laurey Williams states as ‘sumpin wrong inside him’. This study takes these claims seriously by placing Oklahoma! within the context of the American eugenics movement to propose that eugenic constructions of degeneracy and feeble-mindedness heightened the societal threat posed by Jud, coloured the musical’s main themes and shaped the show’s aesthetics. While contemporary audiences may struggle to read Jud as disabled, 1940s critics show how period audiences could interpret the character’s sexual threat through a eugenicist lens.