The Able-bodied Disabled: A Study of Social Disability of Widows in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Water

Abstract

This research work delves into delineating the manners in which the widows in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Water are reduced to socially disabled beings. Their disability is socially constructed and is dependent on the multiple advertent practices that ensure its generation and sustenance. This paper navigates its main contention by employing the findings of two relevant theorists, Rosemarie Garland and Erving Goffman. Garland’s work on freaks and enfreakment, becomes the lens through which the alteration in the widows’ physical appearance to disable them is researched. While, Goffman’s concept of stigma theory, accentuates the part stigmatization holds in socially disabling the widows. This paper additionally relies on the work of Marie Luisa Frick to explain how this social disability culminates into dehumanization. Social disability then in Water is a deliberately and systematically orchestrated phenomenon.