Semester Award Granted
Summer 2025
Submission Date
September 2025
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
Thesis/Dissertation Advisor [Chair]
Taylor Hagood
Abstract
This thesis presents a close reading of The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, engaging Indigenous studies and disability studies to illuminate how the novel interrogates embodiment, medical authority, and human difference. By situating the text within historical frameworks of medicine and corporeality in Mexico, and alongside speculative modes that seek to recuperate non-Western epistemologies, the analysis reveals how Moreno-Garcia reimagines the body as mutable, relational, and politically charged. The narrative’s hybrid characters and transgressive identities offer a generative lens through which to explore bodily variance, not as deviation, but as a site of possibility. Ultimately, this thesis argues that Moreno-Garcia’s work contributes to emerging discourses that destabilize normative conceptions of the human and open space for pluralistic, embodied knowledge.
Recommended Citation
Young, Jessica Elizabeth, "MATERIA NON MEDICA: READING DISABILITY AND MEDICAL NARRATIVES IN THE DAUGHTER OF DOCTOR MOREAU" (2025). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 152.
https://digitalcommons.fau.edu/etd_general/152