“Willingness to Work Emanated From Our Incomplete Bodies”
Gender, Normality, and Productivity in Autobiographical Writings of Czech Interwar “Armless Wonders”
Lucie Storchová
Lucie Storchová (*1979), assistant professor at the Faculty of Humanities of the
Charles University in Prague , storchova_ lucie@yahoo.com Other contributions by the same author
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The study analyses the ways in which an autobiographical ‘self ’ was produced
in ‘super-crip’ narratives of the so-called ‘armless wonders’ in Czechoslovakia
in the 1920s and 1930s. In particular, the text focuses on the autobiographical
narratives and other texts by František Filip (1904–1957), an ‘exemplary
entrepreneur and self-made-man’. ‘Armless Frankie’, as he was known,
became famous for his school performances, during which – with reference to
his own ‘life’s struggles’, and ‘exemplary’ activities of his ‘defective body’ – he
communicated to his young audience the notions of republican civic fitness
and capitalist work ethic. Leaning against the recent intersectional work in
disability history, this study emphasises the constructed nature of disability.
The article raises and explores the following questions: What discourses of
difference were most prominent in articulating the ‘self ’ in autobiographies?
Did they de/activate each other in the process of meaning-making, and (if so)
how? How did they produce the author’s self and the bodily difference itself?
What kind of rhetoric strategies were used to visualise the extraordinary body
in the accompanying photographs? How were these discursive intersections
projected onto concepts of body of the nation and state’s social policy? Is it
possible to interpret these strategies as forms of “neutralization” of the bodily
difference?