DIFFERENT SEEKING SAME

Playing with Aesthetic Distance in Disability Poetry

This essay explores a distinctive function of disability poetry, which is to modulate aesthetic distance by presenting disability as a conspicuous difference or as a universal feature of human life. This article draws upon disability poetics to illustrate how disability poetry uses sameness and difference between bodies and subjective experiences of the world in order to achieve a variety of affective goals, from ridiculing ableist expectations to creating empathy.