Monsters and Disability: The Violence of Interpreting Bodies in Aristotle and Homer

Silverblank, Hannah and Ward, Marchella (2024). Monsters and Disability: The Violence of Interpreting Bodies in Aristotle and Homer. In: Felton, Debbie ed. The Oxford Handbook of Monsters in Classical Myth. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 399–414.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780192896506.013.44

Abstract

This chapter looks at the rhetorical constructions of monstrosity and disability in Aristotelian philosophy and Homer’s Odyssey Book 9—and proceeds by reading backwards in time, a methodology drawn from queer studies and disability studies. First, the chapter establishes some of the dangers of reading bodies for meaning in post-classical modernity. Then it contextualizes these physiognomic readings in Aristotelian interpretations of bodies (Parts of Animals, Physiognomonica, Generation of Animals). Finally, the chapter considers the role that these modes of monstering, and concomitant abdications of moral responsibility for violence, play in Odysseus’ encounter with the Cyclops Polyphemus. Odysseus’ rhetorical connection between disability and monstrosity can be dangerous and oppressive to people with non-normate bodies in the real world; but when read outside Odysseus’ interpretative lens, the monster becomes a spark for imagining alternative ways of living in multi-species community and interdependence.

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