Literary Disability Studies in John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men

Disability has an omnipresence in our daily lives, from our encounters with people with disabilities in real-life experiences to encountering them in novels, movies, and video games. After the Vietnam War was pursued by movements like Civil Rights and social discourses revolving around race, gender, and sexuality gained momentum in the 1970s, there was an urge for a civil rights-based model for disability. Previously, disability was considered a physical or mental deviance in the individual, an affliction to be cured or eliminated. This medical model gave its place to a social model, in which the social, political, and cultural environment rendered people with impairments disabled. Recently, some theorists have denounced drawing lines between the social and medical models and instead propose a liminal cultural model, believing that this mixed paradigm is the only model that does justice to the lived experiences of people with disabilities. The present study aims at analyzing John Steinbeck’s novella, Of Mice and Men. It investigates how Lennie, a person with a cognitive disability, is treated and the challenges he faces, grounded on Garland-Thomson’s cultural theorization of disability through three concepts of feminism, otherness, and disability.