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“Isn’t It Pretty to Think So?”—Disability and the Queering of Masculinity in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover

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The Male Body in Representation

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender ((PSRG))

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Abstract

Martina Kübler’s contribution reads the disabled male white body through the lens of Queer Theory and analyzes its oscillation between several levels of signification: Focusing her analysis on Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) and D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), she shows how disability can serve as a metaphor to construe ‘masculinity in crisis’ or to deconstruct a supposedly stable hegemonic masculinity through its association with femininity and homosexuality. Yet, her innovative take on the subject also illustrates that disability, as a differential category, can interact with constructions of masculinity in more productive ways: here, the material effects of impairment, particularly impotence, can foster non-normative ways of knowing, being, and experiencing the world by challenging the ‘normal’, the ‘heterosexual’, and the ‘masculine’ and ultimately inspire more creative—queer—ways of being.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For this line of argument see, for example: Rudat (1984, 33–36), Gladstein (1986), and Bak (2009).

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Kübler, M. (2022). “Isn’t It Pretty to Think So?”—Disability and the Queering of Masculinity in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. In: Dexl, C., Gerlsbeck, S. (eds) The Male Body in Representation. Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88604-2_13

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