Queer and Crip Embodiment in Woolf's Orlando and Beckett's Endgame: A Comparative Study

This article argues that Virginia Woolf's Orlando (1928) and Samuel Beckett's Endgame (1958), when read through a combined queer/crip theoretical lens, reveal a continuum in twentieth-century literature's critique of normative embodiment, temporality, and autonomy. While Orlando employs playful gender transformation and centuries-spanning narrative to challenge fixed identity and chrononormativity, Endgame presents a stark vision of disabled interdependence and stalled time in a post-apocalyptic setting. Through close textual analysis informed by queer theory (Butler, Halberstam) and disability studies (McRuer, Kafer), this study demonstrates how both texts destabilize the modern ideal of the autonomous, progressive, able-bodied subject. The comparison illuminates how privilege mediates experiences of non-normativity while revealing shared strategies of resistance to compulsory able-bodiedness and heteronormative time. Ultimately, this dual reading contributes to interdisciplinary conversations at the intersection of literary modernism, queer studies, and disability theory.