Shattering Normalcy: Disability and Queerness in Tennessee Williams’s One Arm

abstract:In addition to his extensive body of dramatic work, Tennessee Williams also wrote several screenplays that are inseparable from his oeuvre in terms of both content and form. His plays and screenplays–which Williams himself referred to as “film plays,” indicating their hybridity–are sites where the playwright explores aesthetic possibilities that blur the line between stage and screen. Exploring similar themes, such as the oppression and suffering of women, disabled people, and queer individuals, Williams’s film plays also demonstrate his desire for new aesthetic formulations. This article analyses Tennessee Williams’s unfilmed film play One Arm (published in 1984) as a major but neglected moment in his dramatic exploration of disability and the non-normative body. As in his other writing, Williams shows in One Arm that heteronormative and ableist norms can push individuals to the edges of society by stigmatizing and pathologizing their identities. By depicting their social and cultural transgressions, Williams celebrates allegedly excessive and deviant behaviour as well as “abnormal” bodies. The article further argues that in One Arm, Williams calls attention to the importance of creating a sense of community among disabled and queer subjects for a livable crip/queer future, and he calls for allyship among these communities to overcome oppression.