Identity and the Fictions of Disability

This study considers disability and the social construction of identity in a broad spectrum of Gerald Vizenor’s work, asserting that Vizenor constructs a paradigm of physical disability that is uniquely Native, different not only from that of the dominant culture, where disability serves principally as a metaphor for things gone awry with the bodily and social orders, but also from that of other American ethnic minorities. Focusing on agency rather than what he has termed aesthetic victimry, Vizenor never claims the authority to interpret disabled characters for the reader and neither normalizes nor domesticates them as he keeps the reader focused on the impenetrable facts of their personhood and disability.