Extra Consciousness, Extra Fingers: Automatic Writing and Disabled Authorship

Nineteenth-century Spiritualism championed women with chronic illnesses as the ideal conduits for mediumship due to their assumed sensitivity. Positioning the movement's many historical iterations of automatic writing as central to disability history, this article turns to Gertrude Stein and Lucille Clifton, who center extrasensory perceptions in the compositional scene. Foregrounding mind and body, they upend the privileging of the rational male subject who dominates accounts of authorship in literary studies. By modeling collaborative forms of writing that exceed consciousness, Stein and Clifton make way for embracing disabled authorship in our past and present.

Automated summary

This article explores the championing of women with chronic illnesses as conduits for mediumship in 19th-century Spiritualism and the significance of automatic writing in disability history. With Gertrude Stein and Lucille Clifton as examples, it argues for the importance of extrasensory perceptions in the compositional scene and challenges traditional notions of authorship.