A Case for the Literary Eco-Crip: (Re)Producing Disability and Nature in Richard Powers's Bewilderment

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.