Abstract: Inspired by Sarah Jaquette Ray and Jay Sibara's call for more scholarship at the intersection of Critical Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities, this article offers an eco-crip analysis of Richard Powers's Bewilderment (2021), focusing on the character of Robin, a neurodivergent environmentalist, to trace the entangled representation of disability and nature in the novel. I first argue that the narrative articulates a complex representational system in which the framing of the neurodivergent protagonist as alternatively diseased and a supercrip risks supporting ableist assumptions and undercutting the novel's ecological critique. Subsequently, I propose that Bewilderment might also be productively interpreted through an eco-crip lens as a generative site of political possibility. Speculative fiction emerges here not only as a key site for diagnosing problematic cultural imaginaries, but also for envisioning more capacious relations between disability and nature.
Nicola Simonetti (Mon,) studied this question.