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Disability studies generally aim at an analysis of how an impairment becomes a disability due to the society’s definitions of normativity which do not encompass less-than-perfect bodies. Ever since its appearance in 1990s disability studies has focused on cultural and social contexts, thus going beyond the medical and biological discourse of disability. Consequently, a natural step in its development has been to combine disability studies with issues of race, class, gender and sexuality. Such agendas of disability studies as denaturalisation of disability and inclusion of dismissed (disabled) bodies give disability studies and feminism a common ground, thus leading to an emergence of feminist disability studies. Its focus on both feminine and disabled body as a source of identity and a struggle with stereotypes of the female disabled are the most often discussed aspects. The issue of mental disability, however, has not been as yet thoroughly researched. As a theory used for the study of literature, it has been proposed and applied by Elizabeth J. Donaldson. In ‘The Corpus of the Madwoman’ (2002) she put forward a hypothesis that a madwoman is not an avatar of a rebellious feminist but a corporealised reality. This view has been anticipated by Andrea Nicki’s paper ‘The Abused Mind’ (2001), where she searches for a trauma, especially a bodily and a sexual one, to explain female insanity and fight with its stereotypes. This view will become the starting point for the analysis of the theme of female madness in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1996). Using feminist disability studies, this paper will discuss Grace Marks’ relation to her body and her femininity as well as traumas in her past to examine the function of the motif of madness in Atwood’s novel and its role in the overall interpretation of the book.
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