ABSTRACT
In this chapter I draw on two feminist new materialist approaches to disability—Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s “Misfits” and Elizabeth Wilson’s “Gut Feminism”—to reflect on an illness narrative that is also a long thank you letter to a snail: Elisabeth Tova Bailey’s memoir, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating. Through Garland-Thomson’s theory of “misfits,” I explore some of the ways that both Bailey and her companion snail came to misfit and refit their worlds. In turn, I suggest in this chapter that Wilson’s theory of “gut feminism” sheds light on Bailey’s memoir as a story of grief in which interspecies relations soothe the gut. Following feminist disability studies scholars such as Crow and Wendell, and feminist new materialist scholars of disability such as Garland-Thomson and Wilson, I thus argue that we should renew and build on social constructivist arguments of both gender and disability with the kind of biophilia and curiosity for the more-than-human world that is exemplified in Bailey’s memoir. By putting Elisabeth Tova Bailey’s biophilic memoir into conversation with feminist new materialist approaches to disability, I hope to take some steps along this path.
