ABSTRACT
Chapter 5, Halting to the Grave: Disability and Liminal Space, concerns physical disability, predominantly lameness, and its impact on perceptions of femininity and masculinity. The chapter engages with disability theory and looks at the early modern use of the term ‘disabled’ to denote that someone has been removed from their role in society. The cultural association of disability with this separation from mundane life, as well as with violence and death, places it in a liminal space. The disabled figure is perpetually poised at the threshold of a personal narrative accounting for their disability and occupying the boundary between human and non-human or between life and death.
