Shattering Normalcy: Disability and Queerness in Tennessee Williams’s <i>One Arm</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In addition to his extensive body of dramatic work, Tennessee Williams also wrote several screenplays that are inseparable from his oeuvre in terms of both content and form. His plays and screenplays – which Williams himself referred to as “film plays,” indicating their hybridity – are sites where the playwright explores aesthetic possibilities that blur the line between stage and screen. Exploring similar themes, such as the oppression and suffering of women, disabled people, and queer individuals, Williams’s film plays also demonstrate his desire for new aesthetic formulations. This article analyses Tennessee Williams’s unfilmed film play One Arm (published in 1984) as a major but neglected moment in his dramatic exploration of disability and the non-normative body. As in his other writing, Williams shows in One Arm that heteronormative and ableist norms can push individuals to the edges of society by stigmatizing and pathologizing their identities. By depicting their social and cultural transgressions, Williams celebrates allegedly excessive and deviant behaviour as well as “abnormal” bodies. The article further argues that in One Arm, Williams calls attention to the importance of creating a sense of community among disabled and queer subjects for a livable crip/queer future, and he calls for allyship among these communities to overcome oppression.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".