This chapter, which considers selected Atwood texts over fifty years, focuses on sexual politics in her representations of women’s attempts to define and reclaim possession of their own bodies and identities. Within a framework that includes feminist theorists Simone de Beauvoir, Luce Irigaray, Joan Riviere, Andrea Dworkin, Susan Bordo, and Wendy Harcourt, the chapter considers the psychological and sociopolitical implications of body denigration. Signaling Atwood’s enduring motif of the disappearing female body without free will, from the early “mud poem” (1974), the chapter explores varieties of women’s self-obliteration and bodily reclamation in The Edible Woman and Lady Oracle, Gilead’s patriarchal domination over female bodies in The Handmaid’s Tale, women’s often ineffectual resistance to bodily objectification in Cat’s Eye and The Blind Assassin, and disturbing futuristic speculations on the possibility of complete possession of female bodies in Oryx and Crake and The Heart Goes Last through biotechnology and robotics.

Chapter 6 returns to look at ‘real-life’ experiences. On the surface, these life stories often conform to the ‘triumph over tragedy’ format familiarised by the Zhang Haidi narrative. Frequently highlighting the support of the state, these memoirs emphasise the superhuman qualities of their subjects, demanding similar achievement from their audience, disabled and non-disabled alike. Unsurprisingly, the state draws upon such writing to legitimise itself as custodian of a civilised society. Yet, we also see how autobiographies and memoirs hint at the beginnings of the de-collectivisation of subjectivity and the pluralisation of memory. This is significant as, with only a few exceptions, disabled people in China continue to be dealt with as a single homogeneous group with consonant problems and similar desires. Here, Showdown with Death (Duijue sishen, 2012) by Yin Shujun (b. 1977) reveals a unique and intimate history that offers us insight into the way subjective perspectives contribute new spaces for the emergence of new ideals of para-citizenship. Like Zhang Haidi before, we also see how the female disabled body remains a potent site of personal, cultural and political significance.

With the loosening of control over cultural production from 1976 onwards, authors were also freed to focus on concerns of a more social and personal nature as well as to explore the aesthetic potential of disability. In fiction, two relevant strands emerged. In the first, we see the appearance of semi-autobiographical works produced by writers with direct experience of disability, such as Shi Tiesheng (1951–2010), arguably China’s most famous disabled author. In the second, we see the rise of explicitly fictional works, exemplified by the works of two of his key contemporaries Han Shaogong (b. 1953) and Yan Lianke (b. 1958). Chapter 4 demonstrates that, while the inclusion of disability has subverted and challenged the conventions of socialist realism to reveal hopes and aspirations for enhanced inclusion and intimacy, it has more often become the ‘narrative prosthesis’ that reinforces tropes and stereotypes. Disabled people here are variously portrayed as isolated, pitiful, grotesque, sub-human even. Exposure of and violence against the female body in particular by male authors, re-establishes power relationships and offers reassurance to able-bodied male audiences of their superiority.