Abstract
Writing of ‘unspeakable histories’, Odai Johnson calls attention to Greco-Roman ‘curse tablets’ known to archaeologists as defixiones.1 These have been described as ‘inscribed pieces of lead, usually in the form of small, thin sheets, intended to influence, by supernatural means, the actions or welfare of persons of animals against their will’.2 Popular around the Mediterranean from the fifth century BCE to the sixth century CE, the sheets are usually found rolled up and transfixed with nails (hence the name) in places of chthonic resonance: graves and tombs; the bottoms of wells and in caves and temples, often with skulls, bones, or items of black magic.3 The curses are formulaic appeals to dark powers to punish a specific individual motivated by revenge or to prevent a future action. Many were authored by slaves:
Malcius, belonging to Nicona: [his] eyes, hands, fingers, arms, nails, hair, head, feet, thigh, belly, buttocks, navel, chest, nipples, neck, mouth, cheeks, teeth, lips, chin, eyes, forehead, eyebrows, shoulder blades, shoulders, sinews, bones, merilas [?], belly, penis, shin: in these tablets I bind his income, profit, and health.4
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Notes
Odai Johnson, ‘Unspeakable Histories: Terror, Spectacle, and Genocidal Memory,’ in Theatre Historiography: Critical Interventions, ed. Henry Bial and Scott Magelssen (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 11–21.
D. R. Jordan, ‘A Survey of Greek Defixiones Not Included in the Special Corpora,’ Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 26, no. 2 (1985): 151.
John Gager, Curse Tablets and Binding Spells from the Ancient World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 4–12.
Irving Zola, Missing Pieces: A Chronicle of Living with a Disability (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982), 217.
See Michael M. Chemers, Staging Stigma: A Critical Examination of the American Freak Show (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 92–7;
Peter Conrad and Joseph W. Schneider, Deviance and Medicalization: From Badness to Sickness (St. Louis, MO: Mosby, 1969).
On the major trends of this disciplinary discourse, see Paul K. Longmore, Why I Burned My Book and Other Essays on Disability (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003);
Lennard J. Davis, Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism, and Other Difficult Positions (New York: New York University Press, 2002);
Lennard J. Davis, ed., The Disability Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 2006);
Victoria Ann Lewis, ed., Beyond Victims and Villains: Contemporary Plays by Disabled Playwrights (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2006).
Michael M. Chemers and Hioni Karamanos, ‘“I’m Not Special?”: Timmy, Jimmy, and the Double-Move of Disability Parody in South Park,’ in Deconstructing South Park: Critical Examinations of Animated Transgression, ed. Brian Cogan (Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2012), 29–54, 33.
David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000).
Kenny Fries, Staring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside Out (New York: Plume, 1997), 4–5.
Kathy Cowan, ‘Victoria Ann Lewis,’ in Art and Activism: Pioneering Theater Artists with Disabilitiesj (Berkeley, CA: Regional Oral History Office, the Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley, 2004);
Victoria Ann Lewis, ‘Disability and Access: A Manifesto for Actor Training,’ in The Politics of American Actor Training, ed. Ellen Margolis and Lissa Tyler Renaud (London: Routledge, 2009), 177–97.
John Belluso, A Nervous Smile (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2006), 18–19.
John Belluso, Pyretown (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2006), 25.
Following the death of actor Christopher Reeve, pressure sores became a point of ideological controversy in the disability community. See Michael M. Chemers, ‘Reeve, Christopher (1952–2004),’ in Encyclopedia of American Disability History, ed. Susan Burch (New York: Facts on File, 2009), 765–6.
Ann Pellegrini, ‘Staging Sexual Injury: How I Learned to Drive,’ in Critical Theory and Performance, ed. Janelle Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 413.
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Chemers, M.M. (2015). Defixio: Disability and the Speakable Legacy of John Belluso. In: Luckhurst, M., Morin, E. (eds) Theatre and Human Rights after 1945. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137362308_12
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