Negotiating the Disabled Body: Representations of Disability in Early Christian Texts

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Negotiating the Disabled Body explores how nonnormative bodies are presented in early Christian literature through the lens of disability studies. In a number of case studies, Solevag shows how early Christians struggled to come to terms with issues relating to body, health, and dis/ability. These efforts to interpret unruly and extraordinary bodies appear in the texts in a multitude of ways, from healing in the gospels to inflicting disability in the Acts of Peter and from theologizing in Paul’s letters to using disability as invective in Papias. Solevag uses the concepts of narrative prosthesis, gaze and stare, stigma, monster theory, and crip theory to examine early Christian material to reveal the multiple, polyphonous, contradictory ways in which nonnormative bodies appear.