Haunting J. Marion Sims: Disability and Race in Bettina Judd's "Patient"

This paper will draw upon crip feminist scholarship to explore poetic recoveries of black, disabled, female voices. It will center Black feminist poet Bettina Judd, arguing that a disability studies lens draws attention to the ways her poetry unearths racial and ableist violence. Judd is “haunted” by the lives of Anarcha Wescott, Betsey Harris, and Lucy Zimmerman, enslaved women purchased in the nineteenth century by the inventor of the modern speculum, Dr. J. Marion Sims. Delchamps will argue that recovery efforts like Patient are not merely caring; rather, poetic recovery can violently carve into legacies of medical white patriarchal violence.