"Deficiency" as Method: Disabled Bodies, Gaze Mechanisms and the Sensory Community in American Literature

Abstract

Taking prosthesis as the core pivotal concept, this study selects Moby-Dick, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and Kindred as primary texts, with Geek Love and The Story of My Life as comparative texts. It systematically delineates the representational mechanisms of disabled bodies in American literary contexts spanning the 19th to the 20th century, and advances the core research question of how deficiency structures the dynamics of seeing and being seen, and subsequently engenders community. This problematic differentiates the present study from existing scholarship that predominantly offers representational inductions of disability images.The argument unfolds along three interconnected threads: prosthesis, gaze, and the sensory community. It explicates how prosthesis, operating as a dual apparatus of materiality and narrative, furnishes a relational model distinct from national imagination and identity politics for the sensory community anchored in shared, partial, and interdependent perceptual experiences. This paper further demonstrates that disabled body writing in American literature does not constitute a mourning for "lack", but rather an ethical formulation of partiality: namely, deficiency is not a defect awaiting remediation, but a structural point of departure for reconfiguring the imaginative framework of community.