Extra Consciousness, Extra Fingers: Automatic Writing and Disabled Authorship

Abstract

Nineteenth-century Spiritualism championed women with chronic illnesses as the ideal conduits for mediumship due to their assumed sensitivity. Positioning the movement’s many historical iterations of automatic writing as central to disability history, this article turns to two twentieth-century practitioners of automatic writing, Gertrude Stein and Lucille Clifton, whose centering of extrasensory perceptions in the compositional scene upend the privileging of the rational male subject who dominates accounts of authorship in literary studies. By modeling collaborative forms of writing that exceed consciousness, Stein and Clifton make way for embracing disabled authorship in our past and present.