Cripping the Welfare Queen: Disability and Infrastructural Violence in Sapphire's Push and Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones

Turning to Sapphire’s 1996 novel Push and Jesmyn Ward’s 2011 novel Salvage the Bones, this chapter examines how these novels forge necessary links between welfare reform’s disabling reorganization of public infrastructure and pathological narratives of Black mothering like the so-called welfare queen. It argues that the welfare queen functions as perhaps the definitive disability narrative of global capitalism: she offers a cautionary tale of state dependency that enabled the reallocation of public resources toward a global elite. Yet, rather than disavowing disability, both novels depict young Black mothers grappling with the debilitating context of infrastructural divestment, in which the basic support systems for maintaining life—public schools, hospitals, housing, social services—have become increasingly compromised. As such, they enable the elaboration of a Black feminist and critical disability politic centered around welfare queen mythology, one that identifies, contests, and overwrites the punitive aims of public resource distribution.