Together with Chapter 1, this chapter helps contextualize the closer readings and case studies that follow by providing an introduction to reparative reading and the cultures of critique (and post-critique) within which it emerged over the past several decades. It also discusses some of the key features of Sedgwick’s development of reparative reading, including shame, materiality, queer futures, and the oscillation between paranoid and reparative positions.

Starting with a brief overview of the Homeric tradition to which Sappho and her ancient listeners on Lesbos may have had access, the chapter then looks at different models of intertextuality, within both oral poetic and textual contexts, and teases out how these shape our understanding(s) of Sappho’s reception of Homer. The nonhierarchical, “avuncular” mode of intertextual interpretation is introduced as one that allows readers to find common ground between poets, rather than focusing exclusively on their latent rivalries.

Taking Penelope’s exemplary remembering of Odysseus as its point of departure, this final chapter argues that Sappho’s lyrics shift the focus of women’s remembering from male to female objects, in this way creating an “avuncular” variation on the Odyssey’s conjugal paradigm. The fragments examined display the “sisterly” dynamics that exist alongside marriage – something the Odyssey itself does not explore. Sappho’s fragments feature the girls and women that wives once were before they were married. The bonds that remembering sustains in Sappho’s world exist alongside the vertically inflected (conjugal, maternal) relationships that more visibly defined a woman’s life. The scenes of recollection are appropriately adorned with lightly woven wreathes, fabrics, flowers, fragrant oils, suggesting the precariousness and fragility of these bonds, in comparision with the supposed enduringness of marriage and patrilineal lineage, with its accumulated household wealth passed on from one generation to the next.

In the Conclusion to this book, we move from looking back to assembling a future. This chapter shows that the metaphorical uses of disability that have been examined throughout the book remain with us in the present. And it attempts to set out some approaches towards ending this practice of making meaning out of bodies. This will require, the conclusion argues, more than a commitment to neoliberal diversity initiatives and to inclusion (though inclusion remains nonetheless urgent) – it will require us to decolonise the way that we look, and to disassemble the classical tradition in favour of models that insist on the receiver’s accountability. Maria Oshodi’s 1992 play Hound is an important text in this chapter, which looks beyond the line, or inheritance model of classical reception to the example of Stacey Park Milbern’s ‘crip ancestorship’ model. Ultimately, the conclusion is invested in the core questions of this book: what kind of an ancient world would we need to imagine, who would we need to take as our ancestors, and how might we organise the models that figure our relationship with it and them, in order for a more equal future to become our reality?

This introduction begins by setting up the core question of this book: why is it that disability is still frequently used as a metaphor, despite awareness that this is harmful – and what can we as readers and receivers of classical texts do about it? The role played by spectators, by models of reception, and by ways of understanding vision in this problem are underlined. The chapter introduces the concept of assemblage theory, seeing it as something that arises out of the focus on the reader evident in reception theory’s beginnings. It draws out some of the benefits of an assemblage-thinking model, weighing them against other ways of understanding reception and relation. It closes with some examination of the various activisms and limitations evident throughout the book.

Here, the book pauses for a brief interlude. Throughout the book I have made the case that ableist practice of reading bodies for meaning is a reflex of coloniality as well as of classicism. But the narrativizing of blindness as a kind of special knowledge and as a kind of ignorance (explored in the previous chapter) is so frequent in colonial writing as to have been adopted (and explicitly subverted) in anti-colonial and decolonial writing. And here we pause to examine some examples of this, including in the plays of Edgar Nkosi White, Ola Rotimi (and Otun Rasheed), Rita Dove, Danai Gurira and Katori Hall. This leads to a discussion of empire’s specific visuality, drawing on the human zoo and the colonial gaze it shared with the European imperialism and the imperial theatre. The chapter concludes with further investigation of the problem of time (which recurs throughout the book), drawing in more detail on some of Deleuze’s formulations of temporality.

Chapter Five attempts to draw out some strategies of visual activism, or resistant spectatorship from the figure of the blind character. Leaning on analyses of staring in disability studies and Black feminist philosophy, it argues that looking back is not only a retrospective gaze but also an activist one. Plays by Sarah Kane, Martin Crimp, Peter Rose, John Dryden and Nathaniel Lee, Henry Chettle and John Day, and others are at the core of this chapter, as well as other paratexts for discourses on the ethics of spectating (including, for instance, Judith Butler and Susan Sontag’s writing on the ethics of looking at photographs of torture). The chapter concludes that spectatorship needs to divest itself of a view-from-nowhere model and move towards a situated view-from-somewhere model, that emphasises its partiality and its accountability.

Chapter Three begins with a reading of Everyman, and deals with the persistent narrative use of disability as a kind of metaphorical death. This is not just the case in medieval or early modern drama, but persists in the present day where it is still evident in the dangerous (and deadly) ideological fantasy that insists that disabled people’s lives are less worth living than those of enabled people. As well as examining this trope in texts like Seneca’s Oedipus, and through characters such as Lamech in biblically-inspired drama, this chapter also begins to address some of the problems of the model of a classical tradition as a way of figuring reception. The chapter closes with some thoughts on the relationship between this eugenicist conflating of disability and closeness to death, and gender.

Chapter Two addresses the first example of a metaphorical use of blindness: the idea that blindness is a kind of punishment (and results from immoral behaviour). In particular, the chapter focuses on a particularly dangerous category of this trope that persists into the present day – the idea that blind people (and blind characters) are immoral because they are pretending to be blind. Ancient examples in this chapter are Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus and Oedipus at Colonus and Euripides’ Hecuba and Cyclops (these ancient texts recur in almost every chapter). Modern texts under examination here include Shakespeare’s Henry VI part 2, and King Lear, French medieval drama (especially farce) and the anonymous Historie of Jacob and Esau. As well as introducing this metaphorical use of blindness, this chapter also delves further into the question of temporality and origin-positioning.

In Chapter Four we look at what is perhaps the most frequent metaphorical use of blindness: to stand for insight, second sight, or prophecy. The chapter situates this within what is known in disability studies as the ‘supercrip trope’, and looks in particular at the theatre’s special interest in Tiresias as key to the perpetuation of this trope. The plays of Maurice Maeterlinck, William Butler Yeats, John Millington Synge, Brian Friel, Samuel Beckett and John Milton are discussed in this chapter, among others. Finally, the chapter compares the theatre’s (and theatrical spectators’ special implication in this trope with more liberatory ways of figuring blindness in speculative fiction (drawing on the work of Sami Schalk).

Chapter One makes the case for a new way of seeing. Leaning on bell hooks and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s advocacy for an activist type of looking, it sets up some ways we might begin to read against – rather than with – the dominant narratives about disability. This chapter makes the first in a series of connections between classicism and coloniality that will recur in this book, and sees the process of reading bodies for meaning as rooted in colonial eugenics as well as classically-inspired physiognomy. Crucially for the argument of the book, the chapter concludes that reading bodies for meaning is neither a wholly classical nor a wholly colonial practice – and results instead from a particular way of looking back (or a linear inheritance model of classical reception). In closing, it introduces Michael Rothberg’s concept of the ‘implicated spectator’ as a way to return agency to the spectator in an assemblage-thinking model.