To be wounded is to be read: disability and the structures of nonviolent conflict from Shakespeare to the Victorians.

This article proposes nonviolent conflict as a conceptual framework for examining struggles organised through the social interpretation and mediation of embodied vulnerability rather than through direct physical force. Bringing disability studies into conversation with theories of vulnerability, epistemic injustice, pain, and narrative ethics, it asks how wounded or impaired bodies become sites of contested authority, credibility, care, access, and representation. Through theoretically informed comparative close readings of Titus Andronicus, King Lear, A Christmas Carol, and Jane Eyre, the article develops four interconnected modalities of nonviolent conflict: reading and institutional legibility, care and control, access and space, and aesthetics as tactics. The comparison does not posit a linear historical progression from early modern spectacle to Victorian regulation; instead, the four texts function as historically differentiated cases through which the conceptual model is elaborated. Lavinia foregrounds conflicts over testimony and counter-speech; Gloucester exposes the relation among impairment, mobility, dependency, and trust; Tiny Tim reveals the mediation of vulnerability through sentiment and charity; and Rochester places disability within structures of intimacy, care, space, and relational authority. Across these configurations, practices of interpretation and mediation become sites of conflict when they distribute authority, resources, participation, or belonging around embodied difference. Nonviolent conflict thus offers a transferable analytical model for examining how social legibility itself becomes contested without collapsing interpretation, care, dependency, or classification into forms of physical violence.