When disability scholars defined the field's stakes in the 1990s, they articulated disability studies' capaciousness by studying normalcy. Disability theories of normalcy mapped able-bodied normalcy as an expansive regime that disciplines along the lines of disability as well as race and gender. 1 However, recent work on gender, race, and disability complicates an understanding that a singular norm operates against excluded disabled subjects. By foregrounding racism and settler colonialism, scholars have developed an ever-expanding vocabulary—debility, disablement, ablenationalism—to name the regimes that unevenly incorporate certain impaired subjects into disability identity. 2 If the systemic wearing down of racialized populations through injury, illness, and deprivation renders these impairments unexceptional, then what of the purported normativity of able-bodiedness and able-mindedness? Recent feminist and Black studies modifications of Foucauldian biopolitics revise accounts of normalcy by tracking how biopower delineates populations along racial lines. 3 If, as such analysis suggests, norms always emerge through race, then no singular position of able-bodied or able-minded normalcy exists. For whom, then, does able-bodiedness come to be normal? How is such normalcy produced?

Early disability scholarship framed normalcy as a unitary frame undergirding multiple axes of difference, exemplified in analyses of American freak shows' displays of racialized and colonized people alongside disabled people. 4 In such analyses, normalcy and able-bodiedness became substitutes for one another. 5 More recent interventions into disability studies have foregrounded race by instead investigating the normativity of impairment. 6 I further such efforts to disaggregate normalcy and able-bodiedness by emphasizing how normalcy emerges through anti-blackness. I schematize how disability is made abnormal, and ability normal, through a symbolic reliance on Black women who are excluded both from normalcy and from disability. By teasing apart these terms, I reveal that ability implies normalcy solely for white subjects. I track how multiple, racialized, standards of normalcy proliferate by analyzing American poet Thylias Moss's neo-slave "narrative in verse," Slave Moth (2004). 7 Through the form of a neo-slave narrative, Moss maps the racial-sexual processes through which certain capacities become normal or abnormal and offers an alternative genealogy of the norm.

Slave Moth's free verse poems are narrated by Varl, a literate girl enslaved in antebellum Tennessee. Varl embroiders the work's poems into cloth scraps she layers under her clothing. Although Varl is putatively able-minded, her enslaver positions her as abnormal because she is literate. Through this tension between ability and abnormality, Moss complicates implicit assumptions in foundational disability scholarship that able-bodiedness and -mindedness are normative. The work points to a racial-sexual inversion within the normativity of ability—debility becomes normative and ability abnormal for Black women. Not a singular bell curve standard, normalcy describes multiple, seemingly contradictory, measures that operate through racialized standards of proper capacity. Through her embroidery, Varl develops technologies for living in the fissures of both abnormality and able-bodiedness.

Accounting for these fissures requires a different genealogy of the norm. The American freak show looms large in disability studies as a paradigmatic site where disabled people are made into abnormal objects to be looked at and exploited, a process David Hevey calls enfreakment. 8 While the freak show appears in Moss's narrative, it is peripheral to her engagement with slavery. The freak show is simply another site where Varl's enslaver extracts value from her. Moss emphasizes the racialization of the normal by recentering the plantation as a site where difference is forged. On the plantation, Varl's abilities are rendered as exploitable "deformities" that exist outside of both disability and able-bodiedness. From this excluded position, such abnormal abilities come to define the contours of normalcy and able-bodiedness. By recentering enslavement, Moss throws into relief how able-bodiedness becomes normal (and disability abnormal) by depending on and excluding able-bodied Black women as fungible sites of meaning.

In what follows, I first establish normalcy as an implicitly racialized analytic used to articulate the scholarly significance of disability studies. Then, I track how existing genealogies of normalcy—through a narrow historical focus on eugenics and freak shows—situate disability as a foundational vector for biopolitical regulation. The third section maps the distinctions between disability and Varl's abnormalities, concluding that anti-black regimes of normalcy enable disability in Slave Moth. Then I read Moss's treatment of the freak show alongside disability studies scholarship on freaks. This juxtaposition reveals how the whiteness of normalcy depends upon the exclusion of enfreaked Black women. The final section examines Varl's use of imagination to contest these racialized biopolitics of normalcy.

Moss's conception of normalcy complicates understandings of disability and its histories. By foregrounding Black women's experiences of chattel slavery, Slave Moth particularizes conceptions of normalcy and of able-bodiedness. Slave Moth reveals that disability can be contrasted with normalcy only through racial exclusions in the very definition of disability. In doing so, Moss's work suggests that reckoning with "White Disability Studies," as Christopher Bell termed it, requires a reengagement with normalcy's elisions. 9 By bringing Black feminist critiques of fungibility to bear on the biopolitics of normalcy, I open alternative genealogies of the normal.

Normalcy and White Disability Studies

Theories of normalcy and normative abledness have played a central role in the growth of humanistic studies of disability, and thus in the emergence of Bell's "White Disability Studies." In their foundational scholarship, Lennard Davis and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson both denaturalize disability by analyzing normalcy. 10 Davis theorizes normalcy as a modern demand for bodily and mental averageness. Normalcy does not describe reality—it is an artificially stable and narrow standard of able-bodiedness which, Robert McRuer adds, is impossible for anyone to maintain. 11 This standard correspondingly constructs disability as a deviation from a statistical norm. These early theories of normalcy still influence disability scholarship on privilege, able-bodiedness, and difference. Analyzing Davis and Garland-Thomson's work reveals how contestations over the bounds of the normal have become central to scholarship on disability's imbrications with race and gender.

Davis and Garland-Thomson use the framework of normalcy to understand the privileged position of able-bodiedness. In doing so, they often reference normalcy as ability or able-bodiedness, using both terms to signal experiences excluded from disability. For example, while Garland-Thomson formulates the normate to complicate a wide variety of social binaries, her analysis primarily discusses the normate in relation to "the disabled." 12 Such substitutions signal an analytic slippage between ability and normalcy. Normalcy and ability seem equivalent if you assume that able-bodiedness or -mindedness are inherently normative, and that normativity primarily encompasses ability. Normate becomes a way of referencing the able-bodied subject even as it simultaneously operates as a more capacious location that encompasses other vectors like gender, race, and citizenship. In my efforts to denaturalize the normalcy of able-bodiedness, I develop the hybrid formulation of normalcy-ability to make explicit normalcy's capacity to simultaneously encompass difference in general (normalcy) and the specificity of disability (ability).

The double-meaning—both specific and all-encompassing—of normalcy-ability establishes disability as an object in racialized ways. When Garland-Thomson and Davis reference normalcy as ability in a particular sense, they frame normalcy in parallel to other studies of privilege: "just as the conceptualization of race, class, and gender shapes the lives of those who are not black, poor, or female, so the concept of disability regulates the bodies of those who are 'normal,'" writes Davis. 13 Disability theories of normalcy establish the field by situating disability as a functional equivalent of other forms of difference. Such explicit comparisons work by privileging one term over the other. But gender and race inflect the bounds of the normalcy—normalcy cannot be like, for example, whiteness.

The second, general, meaning of normalcy also mobilizes race to forward disability analysis. Even as normalcy specifically accounts for ableism, it also references difference in general. This seeming contradiction coheres into a single claim—general approaches to normalcy insist that disability subtends other forms of simultaneously parallel difference. This approach emerges in scholarship that connects histories of ableism, racism, and sexism. While not emphasizing normalcy, both Douglas Baynton and Ellen Samuels analyze how disability undergirds racial and gender oppression. 14 In doing so, their work suggests how the dual function of normalcy-ability travels beyond explicit engagements with normalcy as an analytic. Disability becomes both foundational and specific.

If disability shapes normalcy in a general sense, and normalcy then excludes a range of subjects, then disability undergirds conceptions of difference writ large. This chain of suppositions makes disability matter. Through theories of normalcy and their implicit comparisons, disability becomes a form of difference that is both singular (uniquely important) and central (ever-present). This doubled quality enabled theories of normalcy-ability to foster the growth of humanistic studies of disability as white disability studies.

As such, scholarship on disability's imbrications with race and colonialism has reimagined normalcy as an analytic. Some scholarship uses disability critiques of normalcy to forge connections across systems of power, as in Liat Ben-Moshe's abolitionist critique. 15 Scholars have also begun to interrogate racial and colonial variations in conceptions of the norm. Nirmala Erevelles, Jasbir Puar, and Rachel Gorman problematize the generalization that able-bodiedness is normative. 16 They analyze how the colonial production of impairment renders such experiences normative, rather than abnormal or exceptional. The normativity of such debilitation evidences that normalcy functions as a shifting rather than generalizable signifier. Clare Barker, through a postcolonial engagement with "exceptionality," further insists that abnormality does not always imply marginalization. 17 Simultaneously, scholars draw attention to neoliberal inclusion projects that have made certain disabled subjects normal. 18 White disability might be normal in its collusion with power. 19 This body of work insists that the same impairment holds vastly different relations to normalcy depending on context.

One's position as normal is always inflected through race and gender. Neither disability nor able-bodiedness can be cleaved from other axes of power through comparison. Rather, disability and ability both become legible via racialized and gendered standards of capacity. As such, disability does not subtend racism and sexism so much as it emerges through them. This article further particularizes normalcy by investigating how able-bodiedness and normalcy were made to seem synonymous not just in disability scholarship, but in a broader understanding of the norm. Such norms are defined through and against Black women.

Normalcy as Biopolitical Cut

Changes in disability accounts of normalcy reimagine the sites through which normalcy emerges. Early scholarship on normalcy and disability situated it within 18th and 19th century projects including human zoos, freak shows, and eugenic race science. 20 Framing normalcy as a historically contingent category allowed Davis and Garland-Thomson to redress disability as an artificially narrow category 21 and disability studies as a marginal field of study. 22 What facets of normalcy-ability are occluded in this narration of its emergence? Thylias Moss's Slave Moth presses on these occlusions by developing a different account of normalcy's "cultural locations." 23 As an alternative genealogy, Slave Moth displaces disability as a singular or foundational form of abnormal difference to examine normalcy's role in racial-sexual regulation. The narrative takes up chattel slavery and the freak show, rescripting them to emphasize how racialized understanding of capacity regulate normalcy.

Normalcy-ability seems singular if one only accounts for biopower via eugenics. Foucault insists that biopower fosters life for some through cesuras that resign others to death. 24 Disability critiques of normalcy track biopower's cesuras across a single axis, mapping how normalcy claims to foster life while narrowly circumscribing life as abled. In such accounts, the eugenic ideal of normalcy-ability is the primary axis of biopolitics' cesuras. 25 Disability activists and scholars then reject this biopolitical logic by insisting that disability is statistically normal. The ubiquity of assertions that "we all become disabled if we live long enough" evidences the ongoing influence of disability critiques of normalcy. 26 This inversion understands bodily difference as disability (although Puar's debility insists these are nonidentical phenomenon) and accepts normalcy as a statistical measure. In doing so, such critiques of eugenics foreclose a more fractured account of biopower. For Rachel Gorman, the field's focus on eugenics, and specifically David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder's "Eugenic Atlantic," reproduces white disability and white disability studies. 27 Gorman maps how such approaches center biological difference as the foundational, raw material for inequality. This focus on "human variation" overlooks structures that materially produce disability and which, I argue, construct an experience as either disabling or abnormal. By centering eugenics, and thus disability, as a singular and foundational cesura, scholars cannot fully interrogate how abnormality emerges through multiple structures and histories.

Normalcy is a relation to power, rather than an accurate or stable measure of bodily variation. As such, normalcy's seeming 18th and 19th century emergence in the metropole can be tracked to normalcy's role in colonization and racial domination. 28 Sylvia Wynter and Achille Mbembe offer such an alternate approach to biopower by investigating how colonialism and chattel slavery delimit a population and its norms. 29 Their scholarship insists that a reversal in focus—from the population made to live to those in the colony and plantation excluded and made to die—reconceptualizes power's operations through the body. Attending to ability-normalcy through slavery and colonialism reveals that cesuras do not work singularly through a deracinated disability targeted by eugenics. Instead, recent feminist scholarship emphasizes how biopolitical cesuras modulate ability, impairment, and normalcy as part of racial-sexual negotiation. These caesuras define ability as a racial marker wherein people of color are constitutively impaired, as in Kyla Schuller's account of impressibility. 30 Schuller maps how white subjects cohered as a population marked for life through impressibility—a white neurological ability that Black people purportedly lacked. Normalcy-ability is white, and so is the population marked for biopolitical flourishing. The apparent self-evidence of racialized impairment is still mobilized, Puar insists, to justify ongoing colonial regimes of bodily harm that are illegible as disability. 31 There is no single standard of normal. Rather, seemingly contradictory standards of bodily capacity cohere as part of a larger network of domination.

As a neo-slave narrative, Slave Moth reframes accounts of normalcy via eugenics by instead emphasizing its racial-sexual splits. Because neo-slave narratives use the past to negotiate power at the time of their writing, 32 the genre offers a particularly useful vehicle for rescripting the relations between disability and normalcy. Since the 1960's, Black writers began adopting the form of historical slave narratives to "reveal the structural mechanisms that historically created and daily re-create 'race' in America." 33 Sami Schalk demonstrates that neo-slave narratives, in negotiating contemporary race relations, grapple with racialized mobilizations of disability and ableism. Schalk, through a reading of Octavia Butler's Kindred, emphasizes that ableism targeted Black people both by physically disabling them and by discursively defining blackness as incapacity. 34 Schalk uses the neo-slave narrative to pivot from disability, a specific quality of the body, to ableism, a system of power that disciplines bodies. Building on Schalk's conception of ableism, I use neo-slave narratives to reframe normalcy from a specific standard to a flexible biopolitical frame. As neo-slave narratives emphasize the imbrication of racism and ableism, they also recontextualize normalcy and ability. By refracting histories of enslavement, Moss reveals normalcy's function as a shifting concept wielded as part of anti-blackness.

Slave Moth's contemporary explorations of normalcy engage histories of anti-blackness. Historians of disability, including Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy and Jenifer L. Barclay, foreground the contextual nature of disability and normalcy during chattel slavery, tracing the imbrications of discursive and material disablement. 35 Dea Boster explores how enslavers used soundness as a broad measure of "the controllability of an enslaved body," rather than disability. 36 White enslavers also pathologized behavior that would be normal for white subjects. For example, Samuel Cartwright's diagnosis of drapetomania defined enslaved people's efforts to escape as symptoms of a mental disorder. 37 In Baynton's analysis of the diagnosis, mental illness is a sign of abnormality that Cartwright mobilizes for white supremacist ends. 38 My analysis of normalcy as a racialized category further emphasizes that diagnosis functioned as a form of social control. As in Slave Moth, a white person's reasonable behavior becomes an enslaved Black person's pathology. The latter disrupts normative white supremacist social relations. Along these lines, Cristina Visperas troubles the distinction between able-bodied and disabled slaves, pointing specifically to questions of will and commodification. 39 Drapetomania and soundness both illustrate how capacity is always read in relation to racial hierarchies. As Hunt-Kennedy puts it, "ability itself has a raced history." 40 There is no deracinated idea of the normal body that shapes disability as its opposite. Not the inversion of disability, normalcy describes multiple, seemingly contradictory standards that emerge through and then justify racial-sexual hierarchies.

Racializing Ability

Thylias Moss's Slave Moth reveals Black women's exclusion from normalcy-ability to contest the very definitions of normal or abnormal, disability or ability. In Slave Moth, Moss traces the roles of control and commodification in chattel slavery from the first-person perspective of Varl, a literate enslaved girl. Moss uses Varl's literacy to explore the brutality of slavery as embedded in ownership itself, rather than any discrete act of violence that then emerges. 41 Slave Moth thus modifies the twinned "quest for literacy and freedom" that Robert Stepto locates at the heart of the African American literary tradition. 42 By rendering literacy as the starting point that enables the narrative and as a means of further exploitation, Moss refracts Saidiya Hartman's understanding that the ascription of liberal humanity to the enslaved facilitated further subjection. 43 Literacy, central to many conceptions of humanity, becomes abnormal. Literacy operates as a site of control that Varl must appropriate for her own ends. Across sixteen free verse poems, Varl details her relations to her friend Jessper, her mother Mamalee, her romantic interest Dob, and both her enslaver Peter Perry and his wife Ralls Janet. In doing so, Slave Moth revises moments both from historical slave narratives 44 and 20th-century Black women's novels. 45 The work has been primarily taken up in studies of African American literature, where scholars situate it among young adult neo-slave narratives 46 and poetry which engages slavery, 47 though it has received relatively little sustained analysis. 48 Scholars have not yet theorized Moss's implications for disability studies, especially her treatment of slavery in relation to the freak show.

Slave Moth emphasizes that the apparent split in normalcy produces racialized enfreakment. Varl opens the narrative with Perry's obsession with the abnormal, writing,

My master is a collector.

Rare things delight him.

Deformity piques in him an unwholesome joy. 49

While Perry is the subject in these opening lines, Varl immediately shifts into simple declarative assertions where deformity—the source of Perry's pleasure—instead acts upon him. As the narrative unwinds into longer sentences spanning lines and stanzas, Varl clarifies that she also is one of these "rare things." Deformity signals a racialized standard of abnormality. Perry frames her literacy as hyper-ability, as both exceptional and freakish. Perry's literacy coheres with his social position as a white, landed man. For Varl, the same ability seems freakish because capacity is a racialized standard. Although Perry's obsession with Varl's difference seems to spark the narrative, the shift in subjects from "my master" to "deformity" recenters Varl as an actor. Varl contests the attribution of abnormality-ability by embroidering the work's verse poems into scraps of cloth layered under her dresses like a cocoon. Varl wields the poem-as-cocoon as a technology to transform her into a Luna moth prepared for flight and freedom. Slave Moth thus details both how Perry enfreaks Varl's literacy and how Varl refigures this process. In doing so, Moss contests abnormality-ability's work to bolster white supremacy.

In Slave Moth, deformity does not describe a person, but a process of pathologization that produces both the normal and abnormal. While Perry understands deformity as an embodied difference, Varl redefines it as a shifting relation to power. Although Perry did not complete a college education, his understanding of difference emerges from "anatomical charts" and 19th century race science. 50 For Perry, enslavement supplements this academic study of difference. Perry purchases animals with limb differences and develops a small freak show of two other people he enslaves, Albino Pearl and Dwarf Sully. 51 Perry links Varl's deformity to these legible disabilities and to freakishness. While the work opens with Perry's understanding of deformity, Varl refutes Perry's framing with her repeated reference to deformity. Varl uses deformity to refer to deviations from social norms: Ralls Janet's relationship to her husband Peter Perry ("There is deformity in this arrangement, too."), literate Varl and her mother's decisions not to flee from Perry before the narrative begins ("some extremely deformed thinking"), and an incapacity for sympathy ("dangerously deformed"). 52 These repeated references to deformity refute deformity as a fixed or predetermined deviation from racial-sexual hierarchies. For Varl, these hierarchies deform all who inhabit them by circumscribing the human. Abnormality is not a natural state, a social category simply describing any natural variation. The category instead mobilizes and reinforces existing biopolitical cesuras.

Such cesuras produce an inversion within the definition of normalcy—distinct standards of normalcy contradict each other because normalcy is multiple, rather than singular. This inversion causes ability-normalcy to break down when used to account for racialized and colonized people—impairment can be normative and abnormality attaches to apparently able-bodied people. Varl's ability to read is made abnormal through anti-blackness. Lewis Gordon identifies these inversions in Fanon's account of blackness: "[a]n adult black who is 'well adjusted,'… is an 'abnormal black.' An adult black who is not well adjusted—in fact, infantile—is a 'normal black,' which ironically means an 'abnormal person' or simply 'abnormality.'" 53 Because blackness itself is framed as abnormal, the psychically pathological Black person is 'normative.' Distinct standards of normalcy appear to contradict each other because normalcy is in fact a shifting standard that coheres at the nexus of racial and sexual difference.

In Slave Moth, Varl's literacy becomes hyper-ability through racial-sexual standards of capacity. Prior research on hyper-ability has focused on Black men, as in Charles Nero's analysis. 54 By focusing on a Black girl, Slave Moth further emphasizes that racialized standards of bodily capacity do not neatly emerge through a binary between masculine/(hyper)abled and feminine/debilitated. 55 Rather, scholarship on gender as a racialized—white—category insists that the very understanding of capacity as gendered is always inflected by race. Cathy Cohen's "Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens" opens up such an understanding of normalcy as a racial-sexual relation to power. Cohen differentiates between heterosexuality and heteronormativity: not all heterosexuals benefit from heteronormativity because, in a sex/gender system stabilized by whiteness, not all opposite-sex relationships are normative. 56 Neither heterosexuality, not able-bodiedness, protect one from the marks of abnormality, deviance, freakishness. Normality indexes one's proper social role, rather than any universal relation to bodymind difference.

Through racialized standards of capacity, what is normal for one person becomes abnormal for another. Just as normalcy does not self-evidently encompass all able-bodied subjects, similarly, disability and abnormality are not always synonymous—the difference depends on how one is targeted by biopower. Varl foregrounds this fractured nature of normalcy by arguing that her literacy only seems abnormal to Perry in the context of slavery: "I should be in the north…/….,where I would not be oddity." 57 Slave Moth lays bare how normalcy operates through a broader network of racial-sexual biopolitics wherein ability is sometimes normal and sometimes abnormal. Thus, ability, which coheres through racial-sexual norms, is a relation to power rather than any specific capacity. What is hailed as a disability is less a function of impairment than it is a question of biopolitical norms. 58

What, then, is the relationship between Varl's abnormal abilities and disability? Varl's abnormality is not a disability. Moss distinguishes between abnormality-ability and abnormality-disability in the poem "Burn." The terse poem relays a conversation between Varl and her friend Jessper, who is enslaved nearby, where Varl unsuccessfully pushes Jessper to flee enslavement. Varl raises the issue after seeing "a confusion / of flattened roses on [Jessper's] face," the burnt imprint of an iron. 59 Jessper confesses, to an aghast Varl, that her paralyzed enslaver Eveline Staley demanded Jessper hold the iron up to her own face. 60 Jessper accommodates Eveline's disability by burning herself, acquiring an abnormality that might fit, Varl thinks, in Perry's collection. 61 To Varl, this is yet another abnormal and inhuman manifestation of slavery's effects.

This perversion of access reveals the racialized tensions between abnormality and disability. Disability in fact facilitates the Staleys' sexual, psychic, and physical abuse of Jessper. Jessper connects Eveline's cruelty to her disability and to the ways Eveline's husband threatens Jessper with sexual violence:

"Maybe that's why Mistress Eveline hates me

so much, knowing her husband isn't

going to give up those physical things

just because of her." 62

According to Jessper, Eveline is desexualized by her husband because of her disabilities. A lack of physical access leaves Eveline "confined to the bed" and reliant on Jessper's care labor. 63 However, by filtering these experiences through Jessper, Moss foregrounds how Eveline uses the ableism she faces as a disabled white woman to justify her abusive behavior. Through Eveline, Moss exemplifies how white women can be recognized as disabled and worthy of care and can use that recognition to injure others, like Jessper. The scene exemplifies Puar's insistence that disability proliferates illegible debilities, such as Jessper's scars. Varl's capacities and Jessper's injuries become abnormal while Eveline uses her disabilities to exploit Jessper's care labor, producing deformity. 64 Abnormality-ability becomes both a site of racialized violence and an effect of such exploitation. In doing so, abnormality-ability works both as an inversion of white disability and as its enabling foundation.

Fungibility and Freakishness

Varl and Jessper are not simply excluded from disability, which encompasses those whose incapacities are abnormal. The very conception of abnormality relies on this exclusion. Black women are made to hold the contradictory meanings of able-bodied and abnormal even as they are used to uphold the boundaries between these terms. Varl's literacy seems to disrupt the boundaries of the normal and the able-bodied or -minded. However, in serving as an exception, Varl is used to enable these categories. The normalcy of able-bodiedness, the implicit links between able-bodiedness and personhood, depend on this excluded location. Able-bodiedness becomes normative for white subjects, and disability abnormal, through their frictional relationship to and reliance on Black women's abnormality-ability.

White disability emerges through abnormality-ability as part of a process of Black fungibility identified by Black feminist scholars. Toni Morrison, Saidiya Hartman, and Hortense Spillers each track how white American subjects define themselves through blackness. 65 Hartman connects this symbolic use of blackness to enslavement as a process of commodification. Theories of Black fungibility situate Black women's roles in adjudicating normality within a broader dynamic inaugurated by chattel slavery. In Slave Moth, Moss reveals how white disabled subjects mobilize fungibility. Disability relies on nondisabled blackness as a fungible site of meaning, rendering figures like Varl and Jessper "abstract and empty vessel[s] vulnerable to the projection of others' feelings, ideas, desires, and values." 66

Black fungibility subtends disability in part by supporting standards of normalcy that define disability. In fact, normalcy-ability appears self-evident through the paradox it produces: Black women's abnormality-ability. Such contradictions, what Hartman terms "the elasticity of blackness," enable Black fungibility's role in disability. 67 As Morrison explains, "images of blackness can be evil and protective, rebellious and forgiving, fearful and desirable" as they are made to hold oppositional locations. 68 Zakiyyah Iman Jackson connects the demand that Black people hold multiple, contradictory, locations (a regime she terms "sub/super/humanization") not only to whiteness specifically, but the formation of ontological categories in general. 69 Jackson's theory of plasticity foregrounds how blackness becomes the foundation of difference itself—"plasticity is a praxis that seeks to define the essence of a black(ened) thing as infinitely mutable, in antiblack, often paradoxical, sexuating terms as a means of hierarchically delineating sex/gender, reproduction, and states of being more generally." 70 One such "state of being" is normalcy. Jackson's theory of plasticity clarifies how Black women subtend normalcy-ability through this mutable location as both abnormal and able-bodied. Varl's seemingly contradictory position—neither disabled nor normal—becomes a fungible foil against which disability becomes abnormal for white subjects like Eveline. Varl's abnormal abilities become sites of symbolic value. Slave Moth reveals how Black women's fungibility forms ability-normalcy by foregrounding the plantation's production of difference.

Rather than mapping this dependence on blackness, much disability scholarship has only further mobilized fungible blackness. Black fungibility explains how the consistent presence of blackness in disability thought in fact produces exclusionary definitions of disability. Disability theory and activism have wielded blackness as "metaphorical shortcuts" for white disabled humanity—even as these disability spaces have historically excluded Black disabled people. 71 Such dynamics manifest in theories of normalcy, which engage the racial-sexual function of normalcy only as subsidiary to disability, particularly in analyses of the freak show.

Narrating normalcy through fungibility diverges from disability accounts which foreground the role of 19th-century science (eugenics and race science) and cultural forms (the novel 72 and the freak show). Scholars have used the freak show to exemplify how disability becomes abnormal. 73 Slave Moth instead makes the freak show peripheral to Perry's production of abnormality-disability through slavery. For Moss, the freak emerges from a racialized understanding of deviance. Freak shows only appear as asides that emphasize how Perry stages difference to extract value from the enslaved. 74 By framing freak shows within chattel slavery, Moss foregrounds the racial function of abnormality that makes Varl's abilities freakish. Moss's alternate genealogy of abnormality pushes disability studies to offer a more comprehensive account of racial biopolitics. In doing so, Slave Moth raises questions about the role Black women play in disability accounts of freak shows.

If marginalizing the freak show reveals fungibility, how does fungibility emerge in research that foregrounds the freak show? Disability scholars first began exploring the relations between race and disability through analyses of the American freak show because freak shows brought together a range of figures—those displayed for their impairments or as exhibits of racial difference. 75 In earlier research, disability scholars tracked how freak shows produced difference—impairment, hirsutism, race, sex/gender nonconformity—as a general freakish spectacle for viewers now able to see themselves as normal. Normalcy appears to account for the vast array of conditions and social locations that cohere in the freak. Correspondingly, abnormality appears as a uniting feature of disability. Recent work on freak shows offers a more robust account of race by foregrounding the relations between slavery, racial difference, and disability. 76 However, the freak show remains central to disability analysis through the claim that freak shows collapsed forms of difference. As in normalcy-ability, research on the freak show centers disability as foundational while claiming to examine difference writ large.

Freak scholarship makes claims about difference by using histories of enfreaked Black women as fungible sites of meaning for disability theory. 77 Mitchell and Snyder argue that disability researchers reproduce the exploitation of historic freaks by using them to signify contemporary disability oppression. 78 Such scholarly exploitation is furthered by references to racialized and gendered figures as paradigmatic freaks. Garland-Thomson examines the display of racialized women including Sarah Baartman, Joice Heth, and Julia Pastrana to characterize how the freak shows produced bodily difference as an exploitable spectacle. 79 Racial-sexual difference made these women freakish. Showmen emphasized the respective freakishness of their buttocks, maternal labor, 80 and body hair. While these women are not 'disabled freaks,' they undergird disability studies' arguments for the significance of disability oppression.

Scholars narrate this analytic slippage between race and disability as a sign of the general function of abnormality in freak shows. For Garland-Thomson, Baartman exemplifies how "[i]n these exhibitions, absolutely no distinction existed between this African woman, whose body shape was typical of her group, and the conjoined twins, congenital amputees, or dwarfs who fell outside the narrow, socially constructed borders that distinguish the normal from the abnormal." 81 Davis puts it more bluntly: "racial difference put them [people of color displayed as freaks] in the same category of the disabled." 82 Such analysis deracinates enfreaked Black women to mobilize them for disability analysis. 83 Freak shows' racism becomes an example of abnormality-disability, eliding the complex relationships between 'racial' and 'disabled' freaks. Only more recent work has considered the experiences of disabled Black women displayed as freaks, notably Ellen Samuels' disability analysis of Millie and Christine McKoy and Uri McMillian's Black performance studies analysis of Joice Heth. 84 Still, overall, freak scholarship uses the enfreakment of Black women to illustrate the historical differentiation between ability and disability, to illustrate the singular specificity of abnormality-disability. Black fungibility both describes the historical production of normalcy and the ways disability studies accounts for this process.

However, racial-sexual negotiations of normalcy subtend the freak. Freak shows naturalized impairment as a marker of racialization, rather than as a free-floating difference. For example, to support P. T. Barnum's lie that Heth nursed George Washington, Barnum framed Heth's infirmities as proof of her exceptional age. 85 Impairment becomes a sign of Heth's relationship to race and to the nation. Even white freaks' disabilities signified racial difference—Elvira and Jenny Snow, white microcephalic twins, were billed as Pip and Flip, "twins from Yucatan" as a part of a "common strategy of attributing non-Western origins to people with development disabilities." 86 Like Heth's impairments, the Snow's disabilities visually verified racial and ethnic difference. Physical difference was deformity, and deformity a sign of racial difference. The freak show mobilizes the racial inversions in normalcy that Moss and Lewis Gordon both emphasize. The freak coheres through a racialized understanding of normalcy, rather than a generic understanding of difference.

Slave Moth thus points to the fungible role of Black women in the production of normalcy and in disability histories of such normalcy. The enfreakment of Black women undergirds deracinated theories of ability-normalcy used to frame disability studies as a vital field of study. Whiteness preconditions the alignment of normalcy and ability in much disability studies scholarship while enfreaked Black women mediate dis/ability and ab/normality.

The Biopolitics of Embroidery

Through the first-person verse narrative, through embroidery, Moss develops technologies for imagining freedom within and against able-bodied normalcy. Varl's creative practices build on a Black feminist tradition which traces movement towards freedom even within external constraints, like fungibility. 87 Varl contributes to this work by using embroidery to reframe her capacities from within freakishness and fungibility. Varl's enfreaked literacy enables an artistic embroidery practice. Embroidery becomes a critical technology for self-transformation that moves within fungibility and within abnormality-ability to imagine other modes of being.

Varl's critique emerges in both the form and content of her cocoon. She most overtly deconstructs abnormality-ability by rejecting her putative abnormality at the narrative's climax, when Perry discovers Varl's cocoon and threatens to assault her. Varl explains that

…I am not

an oddity. Being literate

doesn't make me an oddity. No freak of nature.

No deformity. 88

Varl offers a firm, repeated negation in these declarative, sometimes fragmentary statements. In doing so, her critique indexes how freakishness blots out her speaking "I" across these lines, negating her personhood. Varl goes on to explain that deformity really characterizes this erasure of her personhood. 89 She foregrounds the systems of racial domination that render her vulnerable and exploitable through their modulations of normalcy. 90 Significantly, Slave Moth's praxis diverges from disability scholars' insistence that disability is normative. Such critiques invert assumptions about normalcy while maintaining normalcy as a system. Rather than insisting on Varl's inclusion into normalcy, Moss suggests creative work can contest regimes of normalcy. Writing—embroidery for Varl and verse for Moss—becomes the means for theorizing the biopolitics of normalcy and formulating other relations to difference. Experiments in form, as in Varl's moth-making, wield the plasticity of blackness for other ends.

Slave Moth itself, as Varl's embroidered verse diary and as her cocoon, reproduces Varl's transformation into a moth. The text becomes a critical technology for remaking the self, for ushering in what Alexander Weheliye calls "alternate forms of life." 91 In Slave Moth's opening poem, Varl encounters an encyclopedia entry on Luna moths. Intrigued by the moths' short yet self-directed lives, Varl seizes on an anagrammatical correspondence between her name and larva. 92 For Varl, this wordplay is in fact a model—like letters rearranged into something new, she might undergo her own metamorphosis. Varl forms her own cocoon by embroidering this narrative onto squares of cloth worn under her dresses like rearrangeable pages or cloth wings. 93 Slave Moth transcribes Varl's efforts at transformation. As such, Slave Moth's poems are distinct works "button[ed] one to another" which move across past and present, between clear scenes and abstract meditations. 94 The poems are mobile, themselves subject to the rearrangement they enable. Moss traces a narrative arc while embedding metamorphosis in the work's form. The narrative in verse allows Varl to open up new modes of being through writing: "by writing [Varl is] also making a reflection of [herself] / that an ordinary mirror can't produce." 95 The power of creative work, Moss insists, lies not in memetic representation but in its transformative power to "writ[e …] a new existence." 96 Varl's writing reimagines what personhood and capacity might mean by using the very site of pathologization—Varl's literacy—as a transformative technology.

Against fungibility, Varl wields interiority as a site of transformation through her internally directed cocoon. Fungibility renders Black women ciphers for abnormality by framing them as static objects. For Kevin Quashie, blackness so often becomes such a public symbol, occluding Black people's interior experiences of quiet. 97 Recentering interiority, Varl builds up her cocoon narrative between her skin and clothes, carving out space to see herself differently. As Varl explains in the penultimate poem,

…Every time

I think and every time I write, I'm changing my life.

Changing what happened, changing what can happen. 98

Here, Varl employs a chained succession of anaphora, concretizing her theory of transformation at the sentence level. In doing so, Varl's twinned use of "writing" and "thinking" mobilizes self-transformation ("changing my life") to transform the past and the future beyond the cocoon itself. Varl enacts what Quashie terms "a consciousness of imagination" when she uses embroidery to rename herself, to reject abnormality-ability imposed from without. 99 Through this narrative conceit, Moss shifts the public-facing historical slave narrative into an inwardly directed technology. 100

The cocoon becomes transformative by rearranging the biopolitics of able-bodied normalcy. As cocoons change moths, so too will Varl's embroidered words change her by impressing themselves on her body. 101 Varl's creative process operates by refusing animacy hierarchies and the biopolitics of impressibility—which respectively insist that embroidered words cannot change a human and that a Black person could not be changed by impressions at all. 102 Instead, Varl's cloth cocoon mobilizes the animate capabilities of cloth and language to rework herself, insisting on her own capacity to be impressed upon. Varl's cocoon offers a new biopolitical technology that foregrounds self-transformation and interiority rather than using impressibility to cohere a population.

Varl uses her biopolitics of embroidery to meditate on and work towards freedom. Moss sidesteps the slave narrative's ascension ritual of a physical flight from bondage towards literacy to instead explore interiority's role in freedom. 103 The narrative centers Varl's exploration of herself through cocooning, only ending with the suggestion of flight. Following the narrative focus, Varl uses line breaks to emphasize her skepticism of legal, geographically specific definitions of freedom, between the "clearer cut bondage/ of the south…[and] the north's rather deceptive / manumission." 104 Against freedom as a legal status, Varl insists that finding freedom happens internally: "you have to feel it [your freedom] inside / or you'd just be a slave in a free place." 105 Varl "feels" freedom through her embroidery's impressions. Freedom as sensation, as a mode of being even within chattel slavery, echoes a quality Quashie identifies in Marita Bonner's work, which "does not plea for freedom but suggests that the freedom worth having is already always present: the freedom of being, innately and complicatedly, a human being." 106 Varl explain the sensation of freedom through an image of a mouse plucked up by a hawk. For the first time, the mouse experiences a moment of freedom, "sees a truth that nobody/ could have told it," right before it is eaten by the architect of that view. 107 This is the freedom Varl writes towards—a vision of the world snatched between moments of terror and constraint. As such, Varl's animal metaphors echo Mbembe's assertion that "death and freedom are irrevocably interwoven." 108 Like the mouse, the moth experiences the nexus of death and freedom—when Varl first undertakes her cocoon, she values moths' ability to follow their own needs and desires even as they are bound by a short lifespan. Varl wields her affective kinship with moths to reconceptualize freedom-as-feeling while attending to the material realities of unfreedom.

Varl further develops this fugitive motion within fungibility by rendering sexual difference an artistic medium. Varl intervenes in the racial-sexual politics of normalcy by layering these cocoon pages to reshape the contours of her body. Fungibility itself is racial-sexual phenomenon—Hortense Spiller's account of sexual difference in slavery links the use of Black people as "a territory of cultural and political maneuver" to ungendering. 109 For C. Riley Snorton, this fungibility facilitates gender negotiations that work towards fugitive ends. The fungible relations between blackness, ability, and gender open a fugitive potential within regimes of fungibility. To these ends, Varl uses her abnormal-abilities to refigure herself as a sexed subject through layers of embroidered cloth. By "deliberately" forming an "added womanhood," Varl renders sexual difference as both prothesis and excess. 110 This 'added womanhood,' the simulation of puberty, only becomes a waystation to moth-hood. She considers shaping cloth over her stomach to appear pregnant, imagines giving birth to herself, a "free me breaking the cocoon." 111 As such, Varl eschews inclusion into womanhood and normalcy-ability, moving towards something else. In doing so, Varl materializes Spillers' conclusion that "claiming the monstrosity (of a female with the power to 'name')…Sapphire might rewrite after all a radically different text for a female empowerment." 112 Varl's monstrous text, her moth's cocoon, refigures both narrative and bodily form within and beyond racial-sexual abnormality.

Varl's biopolitics of embroidery refigure the abnormality and freakishness she critiques. Rather than reproducing the humanizing subjection Hartman describes, Varl instead uses moths as a model to sculpt a different mode of "being/knowing/feeling/existence," of being free. 113 She mobilizes her enfreaked capacities to critique abnormality and refigure difference. In doing so, Varl shifts biopolitical contestations over disability as a "life worth living." The biopolitics of embroidery instead demands "lives worth imagining." 114 For Varl, writing becomes a technique that sidesteps—if only through imagination—the biopolitical operations of normalcy.