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"Space to Dream": Queer Speculative Disability Narratives & Their Liberatory Value

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"Cassandra After" by Julia Armfield
Found in Armfield's short story collection, salt slow

IDs: Queer, Chronic Illness, Sapphic, Mentally Ill

Author IDs: Queer

CWs: Mentions of homophobia, internalized homophobia, death, drowning, descriptions of decomposing body
"Cassandra After" follows a woman as she navigates the sudden and tragic death of her girlfriend, Cassandra. The story starts when the woman’s girlfriend “returns,” nearly six months after her death. This new Cassandra is decomposing, and seems to only be visible to the protagonist. The story is nonlinear, exploring the woman's relationship with Cassandra through a series of flashbacks interspersed with conversations in the now between "Cassandra After" and the protagonist. Cassandra was the first woman that the protagonist dated, and the story explores their relationship and the protagonist’s reckoning with her sexuality as a part of this nonlinear temporality. Through this nonlinear temporal structure and her communication with Cassandra's body/ghost, the protagonist becomes lost in time, and her lostness parallels the lostness she feel about her identity and sexuality.
The protagonist remembers, “I had kissed a man, just once at a work event, and afterward expected Cassandra to be understanding. I’m not sure why I thought this would be the case, really, except to say that I had never been with a woman before and had perhaps naively anticipated the same unconditional support I received from female friends” (Armfield 165 - 166). Things do not go as the protagonist expects, and Cassandra becomes quite upset. They don’t talk for several days, and eventually, the protagonist goes over to apologize. Cassandra lets her in, and she ends up staying the night. Cassandra never returns from her Saturday morning swim the next morning. Cassandra and the protagonist were not public, and the only reason that the protagonist find out that Cassandra has drowned is because she was “in her bedroom when [the police] knocked” (167).
The protagonist’s relationship with the dead version of Cassandra also plays with time, as it is not until Cassandra has been dead for months that she returns. The story emphasizes the ways that Cassandra’s body is decomposing, and when she appears, it is “in the clothes in which she’d been buried” (149). As the story develops, Cassandra’s body deteriorates further, and she starts to lose control over her movements. At the same time, the protagonist remembers that when she and Cassandra were dating, the protagonist “had a bad body around that time—creaking joints and difficult digestion, a martyr to mouth ulcers and bleeding gums” (163). These aches and pains seem to have emigrated from the protagonist’s internal body to Cassandra’s external body, as her joints are visible and splitting, and she is no longer able to digest food at all (a fact that she laments to the protagonist while attempting to eat fried rice). This physical transference of disability and bodily degeneration also exhibits temporal play, as if the pain of the past is moving out of the protagonist and into Cassandra's body The protagonist defies time's wearing of her body, instead transferring this degeneration to the re-animated version of Cassandra’s corpse.
Discussion Questions
1. Why does Armfield choose to tell this story after Cassandra’s death?
2. Is this a ghost story? Why or why not?
3. Why is the protagonist closeted? How does her closeting impact her relationship with Cassandra? With “Cassandra After”?
"The Great Awake" by Julia Armfield
Found in her collection, salt slow.
IDs: Queer, Sapphic, Chronic Illness

Author IDs: Queer

CWs: Pandemic

In "The Great Awake," people’s “Sleeps” begin appearing as embodied and individual entities separate from their human host. The Sleeps are alive in some capacity, and they have free will. They hover close to their human, but they don’t talk aloud; if they share space with another Sleep, they fight one another. In fact, they seem to act a bit like cats. The humans whose Sleep separates from them can no longer sleep at all. This becomes a widespread sensation, with more and more people getting Sleeps. Not everyone develops a Sleep, and they cannot determine who will or will not develop one. Our narrator has a Sleep, but her neighbor, a woman named Leonie, does not. Leonie desperately wants a Sleep, but our narrator is ambivalent towards hers.
The story, told in tableaus, follows our narrator and Leonie’s relationship as they develop feelings for one another, as well as the larger social shifts that happen with the spread of Sleeps. Armfield’s choice to place us in the shoes of the narrator, a person with a Sleep, gives us a more embodied understanding of what living with a Sleep is like. In the world of the story, having a Sleep can be read as both a social privilege and a disability. Armfield states that the Sleeps are “described more commonly as a phenomenon than a disaster; one medical journal referred to it as an amputation of sorts, the removal of the sleep-state from the body” (Armfield 21). Characters throughout the story experience physical and psychological changes after developing a Sleep, as well as social shifts around access. Because of these social shifts, Leonie’s lack of a Sleep can also be read as disability. As more people develop Sleeps, the world begins to shift to accommodate people with Sleeps. At one point, our narrator goes to see a play with Leonie that begins at 2 am. Leonie’s need for sleep is now a disadvantage. People with Sleeps are socially privileged, even as they experience the embodied symptoms of having a Sleep. People without Sleeps are socially othered, and their need for sleep results in them missing social events, work hours, etc. Through the Sleeps, we see how much social structures impact our understanding of disability and access. Were the people who sleep in charge, there likely wouldn’t be plays at 2 am, and people with Sleeps would be othered. Yet even in a Sleep-majority culture, there are still disabling factors about having a Sleep, such as “the now-persistant wakefulness” (Armfield 22). Armfield’s text utilizes the speculative form and defamiliarization to explore the desirability and undesirability of disability based on social influences and factors, as well as the fluidness of disability and access in their own right.

Discussion Questions

1. How does having a “Sleep” function as a disability? What about not having one?

2. How does the cultural and societal shift around “Sleeps” demonstrate the mutability of disability?

3. What does the narrator's ability to sleep at the end of the story mean? What has changed? Is her ability to sleep now a disability or not?