Claiming Citizenship Through Disability in Ebony Magazine, 1945-1951

In the image above from a 1951 issue of Ebony magazine, a Black woman with short hair, sideshow performer Pearl Jeffries is perched atop a bed and leans in closely to light the cigarette of fellow performer Alzora Green, pictured here as a Black woman wearing a crown. — “Turtle Girl,” Ebony 7, no. 2 (Dec 1951): 123.

Jess Waggoner

Race, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity Fellow (2023-2024)

Assistant Professor, Gender and Women’s Studies and English, UW–Madison

Claiming Citizenship Through Disability in Ebony Magazine, 1945-1951

This talk identifies an overlooked cultural dynamic between race, gender, disability, and citizenship in the mid-twentieth century, as indexed through the earliest issues of Ebony. Here I note three major threads throughout the first six-year run of Ebony: participation in medical technologies as symbol of Black mobility; narratives of Black disabled people “overcoming” disability as inspiration to the Black middle class to overcome racial barriers; and disability and medicine generating fantasies of racial integration. I argue that during this time, Ebony magazine represented an alternative path of claiming citizenship through certain narratives of disablement and rehabilitation rather than expunging disability to construct the ideal able-bodied Black citizen. Furthermore, I seek to understand these portrayals of performative medical optimism as not merely a normative mechanism of rehabilitative logics and disability inspiration, but also as complicating and historicizing well-worn concepts in disability studies, such as cure, overcoming, the supercrip, enfreakment, and “inspiration porn.”

Jess Waggoner is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Gender & Women’s Studies and English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Their research and teaching interests span U.S. literature and culture, feminist disability studies, queer and trans studies, and Black disability studies. Their first book project – Black Crip Modernisms: Race, Gender, and the Roots of Disability Consciousness–establishes the relationship between Black American cultural production and disability social movements in the early twentieth century. They are also at work on a second project exploring historical and contemporary forms of ableism within queer and trans cultures. Waggoner’s publications have appeared in venues such as Feminist Studies, Journal of Feminist Scholarship, Journal of Modern Literature, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Modernism/Modernity, Signs, and Modern Fiction Studies.

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