Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
Winner, 2025 Midwest Modern Language Association Book Award
Winner, 2025 South Atlantic Modern Language Association Book Award
Finalist, 2025 Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History, given by American Society for Theatre Research
Winner, 2025 Lilla A. Heston Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Interpretation and Performance Studies, given by the National Communication Association
Winner, Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Communication Studies Division Book of the Year, given by the National Communication Association
Winner, 2025 C.L.R. James Award, awarded by the Working-Class Studies Association
Special Mention, 2025 David Bradby Monograph Prize, given by the Theatre and Performance Research Association
Shortlisted, 2025 Outstanding Book Award, given by the Association for Theatre in Higher Education
Finalist, 2025 PROSE Awards: Music and the Performing Arts
Finalist, 2025 John W. Frick Book Award, given by the American Theatre and Drama Society
A cultural history of disability, performance, and work in the modern United States
In 1967, the US government funded the National Theatre of the Deaf, a groundbreaking rehabilitation initiative employing deaf actors. This project aligned with the postwar belief that transforming bodies, minds, aesthetics, and institutions could liberate disabled Americans from economic reliance on the state, and demonstrated the growing optimism that performance could provide job opportunities for people with disabilities.
Disability Works offers an original cultural history of disability and performance in modern America, exploring rehabilitation’s competing legacies. The book highlights an unexpected alliance of rehabilitation professionals, deaf teachers, policy makers, disability activists, queer artists, and religious leaders who championed performance’s rehabilitative potential. At the same time, some disabled artists imagined a different political itinerary for theatrical practice. Rather than acquiescing to the terms of productive citizenship, these artists recuperated rehabilitation as a creative resource for imagining and building a world beyond work. Using previously unexplored archives, Disability Works portrays the history of disabled Americans’ performance labor as both a national aspiration and a national problem. The book reveals how disabled artists and activists ingeniously used rehabilitative resources to fuel their performance practices, breaking free from the grasp of rehabilitation and fostering more just institutions.
From state-funded “sign-mime” to Black modern dance, community theatre to Stanislavskian actor training, speculative activism to epistolary performance, Disability Works recovers an expansive repertoire of aesthetic and infrastructural investigations into the terms of how disability works in modern American culture.
"McKelvey takes disability history in a radically new direction by placing theater at the heart of U.S. disability politics since 1960. Tracing the lives and afterlives of government funding for disability arts, Disability Works brilliantly—and unexpectedly—calls attention to performance as a tool of vocational rehabilitation. As the government has tried to put disabled artists to work, telling them how to act, those artists have subverted the rehabilitative approach to disability. From the National Theatre of the Deaf to Alvin Ailey’s American Dance Theater, McKelvey brings new archives, new works, and new crip aesthetics (such as “bureaucratic drag”) to the field of disability studies."
"Bringing queer analytics and crip critiques of work together with performance theory and meticulous archival analysis, Patrick McKelvey offers a rigorous exploration of the rehabilitative ethos structuring relationships between disability and performance in the postwar US. Disability Works is an outstanding example of interdisciplinary political economic analysis: an essential cultural history of the ways governmental institutions deployed theatrical initiatives as crucial infrastructure supporting this rehabilitative ethos, as well as of activist artists who both appropriated and disidentified with the norms of that ethos. Essential reading."
"McKelvey's book offers something engaging for multiple theoretical and practical audiences. His book is a deep archival dive using crip theory methods and aims. He weaves his analysis through a commitment to Black disability politics and performance and queer performance. He gives disability theater historians a rich set of examples and texts over which to muse. These threads weave together to make McKelvey's piece a key text for performance studies scholars and classrooms."
"McKelvey reveals an archive of rehabilitation era disability performances that anticipated (and in some cases fueled) relationalities of difference."
"Offers a new perspective on disability performance and its relation to rehabilitation policies. Masterful use of archival work has uncovered the stories of individuals, organizations, and performances that both enhance and complicate ideas of disability activism in twentieth-century America and highlight enduring ideas of welfare, work, and art."
"An enriching and at times challenging read… The abundant historical, methodological, and pedagogical resources woven throughout Disability Works point to the monograph’s wide yet rigorous breadth, underscoring its meaningful contributions to current conversations in both disability performance studies and performance studies writ large."