“Critiquing the Empowerment of Dis/Able Prophet Tiresias in T. S Eliot’s the Waste Land”

The rise of disability theory during last decades provoked a reconsideration of the general focus of interpreting literary texts. The interdisciplinary aspects as the questions of sex and gender, modern perversions, postmodern inter-textuality make the poem The Waste Land arewarding source of interpretations. This poem is a depot of several interpretations. The hierarchical values, the infinite quest for the lost faith of accepted values revolves around like a labyrinth in this poem. The poem is full of fragments. Significantly, these fragmented burdens are taken and carried away by the dis/able protagonist Tiresias. This legendary mythical character functions as narrator of the poem. This study will attempt to critique this powerful mythical character as the notable capture of the existence of disability and ability in one. His dis/ability is co-constructed and reliant to one another which at the same time resists and conforms the stereotypical representations of the people with disabilities. "This split term-marked by the slashed'/'acknowledges the ways in which disability and ablism are produced and reproduced in relation to one another." (Goodley 126) This article will also acknowledge how the figure of Tiresias registers all the repressive construction of ideological burdens in the marginalization politics. Though he has got the empowerment of the prophetic insight, the imposed gender identity and physical limitations posit him as 'other' amongst the ableist people of the Waste Land. He has surpassed all the forms of marginalization being blind, aged, alienated, passive, bi-sexual in nature. His queer representation of sexual and semiotic difference makes him subversively potential under the rhetoric of cultural power. This study will investigate how Tiresias has become the reification of the marginalized condition of all bodily differences in the realm of hegemonic binaries of the social powers.