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Speaker: Sony Coráñez Bolton, Associate Professor of Spanish and English, Amherst College

This chapter centers a foundational text in Philippine Spanish writing, José Rizal's novel Noli Me Tangere (1886), offering the first disability studies analysis of this text. As one of the most famous modern Filipino novels in the Philippines' hispanophone canon, its analysis offers a window into the ways that the discourse of mestizaje was expressed through and as an ideology of ability. I suggest that colonial society in the Philippines was ineradicably structured through a "compulsory able-mindedness," drawing on the theory of "compulsory able-bodiedness" suggested by crip theorist Robert McRuer. It argues that the literary aesthetics of mestizaje braids together the institution of heterosexual marriage, nationalist patriotism, and disability in order to establish that full national status as a citizen-subject turned on the confluence of heteronormativity and cognitive debility. I suggest the Rizal's famed and hapless heroine, María Clara, the paramour of the patriot protagonist Crisóstomo Ibarra, runs afoul of dutiful sacrificial Filipina femininity. The author will offer brief context and remarks on the interventions of his book Crip Colony and an overview of the chapter prioritizing more time for conversation.

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Sponsor: Race and Gender in the Global Hispanophone Research Group, Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages