Writing Celebrity as Disability: Las Meninas, Performing Dwarfs, and Michael Jackson Fan Day

Abstract

ABSTRACTWhat are the ramifications of human beings transmogrified, by the stigma of disability or celebrity, into objects of cultural fascination, and how can we begin to define the consequences of this process for both the human object and the culture doing the objectifying? This article seeks to compare the experience of performing dwarfs as objects to be stared at, played with, and further miniaturised in the eyes of the public, with the contemporary treatment of Hollywood celebrities as abstract, dehumanised figures. I pair life writing in the form of memoirs (from Józef Boruwłaski and Michael Jackson) and portraiture (examining Velázquez’s iconic painting Las Meninas) with critical work on celebrity and disability by Graeme Turner, Tobin Siebers and others in an attempt to both illuminate the mechanisms by which celebrities are distorted by the process of public consumption and explore the consequences of this distortion on the wider culture. The preoccupation with the body by disability scholars helps ground our conceptualisations of both the famous dwarf and the contemporary celebrity, and the life writings of an historical court dwarf and a twentieth-century celebrity provide a window into the self-conscious identity construction required of ‘special’ figures.