Disability, Victorian Biopolitics and Oscar Wilde\u27s Dorian Gray

In her article “Disability, Victorian Biopolitics and Oscar Wilde\u27s Dorian Gray,” Hiu Wai Wong discusses The Picture of Dorian Gray as Oscar Wilde’s life writing of the androgynous beauty. Extending his praise of Lord Alfred Douglas in De Profundis, Wilde’s descriptions of Dorian as the androgyne can be read as the demonstration of Michel Foucault’s techniques of the self. She argues that the androgynous beauty can be a strategy of bodily practice that overthrows the Victorian biopolitics which enforces a rigid gender role. Moreover, she explores the notion of camp and Judith Butler’s theory of performance to explain the strategy of bodily practice demonstrated by Dorian. However, she has to point out that the strategy of bodily practice of Dorian’s androgynous beauty fails to undermine the able-bodied biopolitics which deprives the disabled the opportunity to re-self-categorize themselves