Soldier Kate, Disabled in a Flawed Logic of Relations
Soldier Kate, Disabled in a Flawed Logic of Relations

Summary/Abstract: This article examines Katherine’s portrayal in The Taming of the Shrew (1594) through the lens of disability studies, highlighting the intersection of disability, gender, and societal norms in early modern England. By reading Katherine’s limping as a literal disability and her shrewishness as a metaphorical and humoral form of behavioral excess, the paper situates her within complex relational dynamics shaped by early modern medical, economic, and patriarchal logics. Drawing on Galenic humoral theory—particularly the associations between choler, emotional volatility, and bodily imbalance—the analysis shows how Katherine’s conduct is rendered legible as a condition requiring regulation rather than resistance. Engaging theoretical frameworks such as Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic logic, Lennard J. Davis’s narrative prosthesis and dismodernism, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s theories of staring and extraordinary bodies, and Gail Kern Paster’s humoralism, the article demonstrates how Shakespeare mobilizes disability as both a narrative device and a mechanism of normalization. The study further critiques Petruchio’s role in reinforcing these norms, reading his disciplinary tactics as quasitherapeutic practices aligned with humoral regimes of correction, while also exposing his dependence on economic exchange and external validation. Ultimately, the paper argues that Katherine’s apparent transformation into compliance reflects the operation of patriarchal and ableist structures that medicalize gendered deviance, even as her moments of resistance reveal the unstable foundations of early modern norms of embodiment, authority, and order.

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