You Forbid Me to Walk: Yokota Hiroshi's Disability Poetics

Abstract:This article explores the work of the poet Yokota Hiroshi, a leader in Japan's disability rights movement, and how he used his experiences of having cerebral palsy to create a new kind of disability poetics. Like in much of the world, Japan in the 1970s saw the emergence of disability movements that aimed to challenge the inaccessibility and cruelty of a society made by and for nondisabled people. Yokota was involved with two key groups of this kind—the literary coterie Shinonome and the activist group Aoi Shiba no Kai—and over several decades published multiple books about the ideologies that justified killing disabled people and the construction of disabled society and culture, as well as several books of poetry. In his poems, he aimed not only to shed light on the oppression and dehumanization of disabled people but to rethink dominant conceptions of embodiment and "able-bodiedness" itself.