Dizabilitatea ca regim narativ și obiect biopolitic în Zahei Orbul
Rezumat
Disability as a Narrative Regime and Biopolitical Object in Zahei Orbul
Abstract: Starting from the critical lack of disability studies in Romanian scholarship, this article proposes a crip, performative, and intersectional reading of the novel Zahei the Blind (1970) by Vasile Voiculescu, distinguishing between the instrumentalization of disability as a “narrative prosthesis” and the social, historical, and cultural dynamics that the text exposes. Critiquing the spectacularization, exoticization, marginalization, and commodification of disabled bodies, the article analyzes the geography of disability through the spaces that produce and administer disability—such as the hospital, the urban periphery, the garbage dump, the fairground, the salt mine, and the village—and the temporality of disability (crip time), which operates within the logic of recovery and the denial of disability (compulsory able-bodiedness). It thus shows how self-ableism and the mystification of suffering transform disability into a soteriological apparatus, erasing identity and social and material integration. At the same time, the present reading examines the intersection of disability with class, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity, arguing that the novel functions as a cultural document and an archive of bodily and social marginalities in the first half of the twentieth century in Romania and may, despite canonical interpretations, be legitimized as a disability novel in Romanian literature. The article therefore advocates for a politics of crip visibility in Romanian literary history and for rereadings that materialize the experience of disability beyond the stylistic and aesthetic horizons that have shaped it until now.
Keywords: disability, biopolitics, performativity, crip theory, intersectionality
Citation suggestion: Marin, Oana . “Dizabilitatea ca regim narativ și obiect biopolitic în Zahei Orbul.” Transilvania, no. 1-2 (2026): 94-107.
https://doi.org/10.51391/trva.2026.1-2.09.
Acknowledgement: This work was funded by the EU’s NextGenerationEU instrument through the National Recovery and Resilience Plan of Romania – Pillar III-C9-I8, managed by the Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digitalization, within the project entitled Measuring Tragedy: Geographical Diffusion, Comparative Morphology, and Computational Analysis of European Tragic Form (METRA), contract no. 760249/28.12.2023, code CF 163/31.07.2023.
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