Abstract
As previous research has shown, people with disabilities often have restricted access to adulthood and its corresponding life events (including sexuality, partnership and parenthood), both in society and in popular cultural representations. This article analyzes five contemporary Swedish fiction films with protagonists with disabilities in order to consider how and in what ways they depict romantic relationships, sexuality, and reproduction as manifestations of adulthood in normative time and life course. The aim is to analyze if ableist norms related to time, adulthood, and sexuality is confirmed or challenged in these films. Four of the five films confirmed the ableist norm and used normalizing strategies to assimilate the disability position into normative life course and timeline. One of the films challenged the ableist implications of the normative timeline thus providing the possibility of crip time. Given media representations’ powerful dissemination of cultural values it is of great importance to scrutinize its underlying cultural values.
Highlights
Cultural understandings of disability are intrinsically connected to the notion of normalcy
Previous research has shown that people with disabilities seldom are considered sexual objects/subjects, a notion that often is perpetuated through popular culture representations (McRuer & Mollow 2012, Longmore 1985, Schalk 2016)
In our study of contemporary Swedish cinema (1995–2018) featuring main characters with disabilities we connect this de-sexualization to normative time and in particular the life-stage of adulthood as infused by ableist normativity
Summary
Cultural understandings of disability are intrinsically connected to the notion of normalcy. Normative life course is based on a normative perception of time, chronological sequence, and certain bodies and minds, with certain sexual preferences It implies a linear development from childhood, through adolescence, and into adulthood (Kafer 2013) manifested through life events such as getting an education and a job, finding a partner, getting married, and having children. The taken-for-granted logic behind this expected life course from childhood, adolescence, adulthood, productivity, parenthood, retirement, and death for a white, cis-gendered, nondisabled person, is one of teleological progress (Browne 2014: 7) Those who experience these life events in another order (or not at all), with a non-normative partner or otherwise do not follow the normative lifeline are considered deviant, for example many people with disabilities and LGBTQ persons. Only two studies exist that focus on Swedish cinema and disability (Ljuslinder 2014; Flodin 2014)
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