More than Metaphor: disability and faith in the thought of Frederick Douglass

This paper explores the entanglement of disability and faith in Frederick Douglass's writings. In contrast to other nineteenth-century deployments of broken bones, burns, and limps, Douglass refuses to attach innocence and passive receptivity to the disabled body. Instead, Douglass imbued disabled bodies with activity and resourcefulness. His narratives use disability to condemn slavery, as in the figures of Doctor Copper and Henny Bailey, as well as point to the possibility of slavery’s undoing. I’ll argue that, for Douglass, disability was more than a metaphor or revelation of false piety. Disability was lived materiality produced by a “diseased [white, Christian] imagination” that, when re-membered through its agential capacity, held promises of kinship and freedom.