ABSTRACT
This article responds to several calls to consider the ways disability studies and trauma studies might work synergistically with each other. Using a reading of Kenny Fries’s 1997 memoir Body, Remember, I identify the socio-political tendency to devalue a disabled life when it is associated with trauma, pain, and loss as a main obstacle to connecting the two fields, and argue for the importance of studying stories in which disability, trauma, pain, and loss are present in order to locate models that counteract such a bias. The genre of life writing gives authors significant control over the construction of their images and is therefore a particularly potent venue for integrating the alternate constructions of trauma survivorship and disability into a single identity. Fries’s memoir insists upon the interrelationship of the seemingly fraught alignments of disability and trauma so that they co-exist, even intertwine, as composites of his narrative and identity. In asserting their interconnectedness, Fries challenges assumptions about the devaluation of disabled lives that involve trauma, pain, and loss. His memoir suggests the necessity and benefits of the intersection of disability studies and trauma theory.
