(Love)Sick, Disabled, and Dying: Investigating the Crip Clock, Gender, and Resistance in Pessoa’s A Carta da corcunda para o serralheiro (circa 1930) [Letter from a hunchback girl to a metalworker (2001)]

Abstract

This article discusses the portrayal of illness and disability in Fernando Pessoa’s A Carta da corcunda para o serralheiro (circa 1930) [Letter from a hunchback girl to a metal worker (2001)] through a critical disability studies lens. First, the article examines notions of time and productivity, presenting a version of ‘the crip clock’ that resists the heteronormative, capitalist, and able-bodied expectations placed on disabled presents and futurities. Second, the article explores the placement of the crip body outside cultures of desirability and love and discusses how alternative understandings of gender and a deprivileging of the anthropocentric experience can create more inclusive understandings of the disabled and/or unwell body. Overall, this article contends that the more expansive crip approaches towards time, the human body, and gender identity found within A Carta should be considered as strategies of resistance against the limiting constraints placed upon crip bodies by ableist norms and structures.