College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

Term of Award

Summer 2026

Degree Name

Master of Arts in English (M.A.)

Document Type and Release Option

Thesis (open access)

Copyright Statement / License for Reuse

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Department

Department of English

Committee Chair

Lisa Costello

Committee Member 1

Joyce White

Committee Member 2

Amanda Konkle

Committee Member 3

Kendra R. Parker

Abstract

Ableist discourse has historically positioned disabled people as ‘unfit,’ resulting in their marginalization within society. This marginalization is not only manifested in terms of their physical performance but sometimes in the way disability intersects with race, gender, and sexuality, reinforcing the construction of disabled individuals as ‘other.’ While prominent feminist and disability scholars have challenged deficit based narratives of disability, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s concept of the misfit, Sami Schalk’s Defamiliarization, John Swain and Sally French’s Affirmative Theory, and Moya Bailey and Izetta Autumn Mobley’s A Black Feminist Disability Framework, Black women’s speculative fiction, offers a critical intervention by defamiliarizing dominant narratives that frame disability as limitation or loss, and, through alternative or futuristic worlds, by foregrounding disability as a site of possibility and potential. I introduce the Other-Abled Body (OAB) theoretical framework, and its identifying markers: Unconventional social relations and Community building—to draw attention to the ways that disability intersects with race, gender and sexuality to disrupt social conventions of ableism and heteronormativity while expanding on the potentials within disabled embodiment. This paper applies the OAB framework to Octavia E. Butler’s, short story “The Evening and the Morning and the Night” to examine how characters with the Duryea-Gode Disease (DGD), a fictional medical condition Butler created, experience marginalization, and how female children of both DGD parents who possess a sex-linked scent help other DGDs redirect their destructive tendencies to create innovations and foster relationships that are beneficial to the DGD community and beyond. The thesis concludes that while love and social acceptance are often restricted for disabled people, they subvert ableist and heteronormative narratives by forging unconventional social relations and communities that help them thrive outside these boundaries.

INDEX WORDS: Disability, Disability Theory, “The Evening and the Morning and the Night,” Intersectionality, Black women’s speculative fiction, Octavia E. Butler.

Research Data and Supplementary Material

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