Histories of disability and emotions

This volume shows how emotions have not merely accompanied disability but fundamentally shaped its history. From early modern pain narratives to twentieth-century activism, its chapters reveal how feelings like joy, fear, anger and pride have defined the lived experience of disability and influenced how others have represented it. Exploring intersections with race, gender, caste, and labour, the book emotional worlds, ranging from enslaved men in the nineteenth-century United States to schoolchildren in colonial India. It shows how disabled people have reclaimed emotional expression as a source of agency and resistance, transforming pity into protest and isolation into solidarity. Drawing on rich case studies across continents and centuries, the volume reframes disability as an affective experience deeply embedded in social power, cultural meaning, and historical change. It urges us to rethink the stories we tell about bodies, emotions and belonging.