Disabled Body Research Articles

Choreographing conjoinment: Side Show’s fleshly fixations and disability simulation

This article aims to amplify disability theory’s impact in performance studies by generating a framework for understanding disability representation in musical theatre. Taking the original and revival Broadway productions of Side Show (1997, 2014) as a case study, I articulate how the musical simulates disability through a ‘choreography of conjoinment’ that relies on the exceptional able-bodiedness of the actors playing conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton. Using disability as a category of analysis reveals how disabled bodies are made to be maximally productive iterations of themselves in musicals. To support this claim, I track the shift from the 1997 production’s co-construction of disability by the actors and audience, which replicates the social model of disability, to the 2014 revival’s grounding in a diagnostic realism typical of disability’s medical model. Side Show’s trajectory generates possibilities for considering the musical as an archive for disability representation and knowledge, bioethical inquiry, and artistic innovation.

Beautiful Monsters: Sickness, Disability, and the Extraordinary Body

This essay builds on work by disability scholars such as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson and Kate Ellis to discuss the progression of the physically disabled body into the extraordinary body in horror films, including Alien: Resurrection (1997), Planet Terror (2007), and A Quiet Place (2018). Applying disability studies research in parallel with theories about the non-normative Gothic body, it argues that contemporary horror builds on the subversive Gothic; avoiding physiognomical prejudices, which suggest that external physical difference is caused by deviance within. This work draws from practitioners such as Fred Botting, Susan Sontag, Joshua David Bellin, Sharon Snyder, and David Mitchell, as well as director Breck Eisner, developing theories such as the transgressive – sometimes dangerous – figures of the supercripple and the hyper alive, before going on to discuss the fear of sickness underlining metamorphic monster narratives. The transgressive nature of the Gothic aligns with the metamorphic properties of sickness and disability, disrupting the healthy/sick, human/monster binaries. Therefore, this work argues that the key to characters with disabilities surviving – or even thriving – in horror and science fiction is to accept and create a symbiotic relationship with their disability, transforming the non-normative body into the extraordinary one.

Between Representation and Reality: Disabled Bodies in Arabic Literature

Between Representation and Reality: Disabled Bodies in Arabic Literature

Facts of cripness to the Brazilian: dialogues with Avatar, the film

The influence of queer theory on the humanities is also reflected in disability studies, contributing to the emergence of crip theory. While the main axiom of queer theory postulates that contemporary society is governed by hetero-cis-normativity, crip theory is supported by the socially constructed postulate of compulsory able-bodiedness that is not very sensitive to the body's diversity. The translation of the term crip into the category of crippled in Portuguese (i.e. aleijado) is a way of giving the same sense of the word in English, indicating an area reserved for people with disabilities. Considering that gay and lesbian studies initially focused their investigations on the question of homosexuality being a "natural" or "unnatural" behavior, remaining within a binary logic, queer theory expands the investigative focus by encompassing any kind of sexual practice or identity that circumscribes normative or deviant categories. From this perspective, disabled bodies are also queer. The objective of this work is to discuss the analytical and intersectional potential of a queer/crip epistemology in the constitution of disability experience from the "global south", based on autoethnographic accounts and analysis of the Avatar movie.

Object.Mirror.Tempo

Abstract This article is an exploration using practice-based research in which I investigated a question: How can I, as a dance practitioner and facilitator, collaborate with a differently abled person on compositional work? I explored how to be open to various ways of communicating and collaborating, not only as verbally, but also by letting disabled bodies and minds’ expertise communicate in their own ways to allow for questioning and challenging normative perspectives. This research was conducted in Denmark at the participants’ group residence. The institutional context was logistically convenient and served as familiar surroundings for the participants. It also was a foundation on which to explore dance research within other institutional spaces. I collaborated with three participants with disabilities in one-on-one sessions, creating a shared physical practice. Together with each participant, I was curious about finding our common interests within the field of dance, and how we could explore them with our individualised bodily expertise. It later became: The Object practice The Mirror practice The Tempo practice By proposing a quadruple loop structure as the methodological framework, I discuss the findings while taking a hermeneutic phenomenological approach. The empirical data were collected through video documentation of the sessions, observations and interviews. The four central topics of this shared experience entailed an examination and discussion of how to comprehend education, uncovering the validity of bodily feedback, exploring Crip time as a tool to question a normative understanding of time, and acknowledging the importance of showing. To get the full experience while reading this article, the reader is asked to ensure Internet access is available so that they can shift back and forth between the text and video excerpts.

Using Pain, Living with Pain

This paper presents the early findings of research into the experiences of pain for those who live with chronic pain and engage in BDSM (bondage and discipline, domination and submission, sadism and masochism), explored using a critical crip approach rooted in crip theory and feminist disability studies. The research took the form of a series of interviews with eight disabled people living with chronic pain who experience pain in their BDSM practices, developing a narrative of experiences. The majority of those living with chronic pain, or who have diagnoses of chronic illnesses causing chronic pain, are women. Chronic pain is frequently assumed to be similar to acute pain; however, thinking through pain in terms of normativity and able-bodymindedness reveals the ableist structures that underpin normative attitudes towards pain and those who are in pain. Pain is understood as dehumanising—and thus the person living with chronic pain is understood as not human, abnormal, and disabled. The disabled body, the body in pain, is a horrifying object of abjection, and the non-disabled observer assumes that to be in pain is to suffer; therefore, living with chronic pain is understood as an ontological impossibility and must be stopped. BDSM is a series of practices forming a space in which the people living with chronic pain in this study are able to engage with their somatic experience in ways that do not expect normalcy, while being disabled and living with chronic pain gives them space to explore non-normative sexual practices.

Kossuth County, Iowa

In this autoethnographic postcard, I consider the realities of a disabled body alongside the potential of self-driving cars. Placing these two considerations into dialogue with one another, I hope to embrace a certain vulnerability associated with laying bare a body for the sake of more fully understanding its role in a cultural, technological, and social context.

Blind Warriors, Supercrips, and Techno‐Marvels: Challenging Depictions of Disability in Star Wars

Blind Warriors, Supercrips, and Techno-Marvels : Challenging Depictions of Disability in Star Wars

Failed collaboration and queer love in Yeats’s The Cat and the Moon and Beckett’s Rough for Theatre I

Beckett’s Rough for Theatre I, first written in French in the late 1950s, picks up the theme of Yeats’s The Cat and the Moon—itself based on earlier material, including Synge’s The Well of the Saints. Staging mutually dependent disabled bodies and charting the elaboration of joint poetic vision, both plays also paradoxically focus on the dramaturgical and poetic potential of collaborative failure. While Yeats insisted that his play should be read allegorically as a dramatisation of the journey towards Unity of Being, this paper attempts to take it at face value, alongside Beckett’s sequel, reading them both as dramas of (failed) collaboration between disabled, mutually complementary bodies. More specifically, it argues that despite Yeats’s best effort to allegorise the grotesque bodies on the stage into abstract principles of Body and Soul, something in his play refuses to be subsumed into allegory and resists the play’s drive towards unity. This resistant “something” has to do with the queer (in every sense) version of love which is being played out on the stage, and it is precisely this queer, sadomasochistic, unproductive love, and the jouissance it procures, uncomfortably, for two disabled characters, which becomes the central theme of Beckett’s play. Further, the paper suggests that this motif of queer love doubles as a paradigm for an alternative form of literary collaboration, one which is not geared towards the actual production of a finished marketable product such as a book or a play, but rather towards the shared creation and immediate enjoyment of stories invented and performed in a space removed from, yet marginal to, the sphere of modern capitalistic exchange.

Bit of Barfi, Sip of Margarita: Disability and Sexuality in Hindi Films

The aim of this article is to analyse the representation of disability and sexuality in selected Hindi films. The study compares the sexual construct of the disabled bodies of Jhilmil in Anurag Basu’s Barfi! (2012) and Laila in Shonali Bose’s Margarita with a Straw (2014). On the one hand, if the ambivalent representation of the disabled and sexualized body of Jhilmil seems to reinforce the ableist and heterosexual ethos, the disabled and queered body of Laila indicates possibilities, resistance and interruptions. In a larger context, it proposes to indicate a much-needed framework to engage with the politics of representation of disability and sexuality in gender and Hindi film studies.

Troubling Law’s Indefinite Detention: Disability, the Carceral Body and Institutional Injustice

Through a case study of the official state representation of the institutional life course of one Indigenous Australian woman who is disabled, I demonstrate that across multiple jurisdictions, legal orders, service systems, material spaces and modes of intervention, law provides for the heightened carceral control of bodies on the basis of their designation as disabled. In being designated as disabled, bodies are positioned as necessarily and legitimately subjected to ongoing, persistent and multifarious control in a way paradigmatic of Foucault’s argument of the policed subject such that the disabled body itself is a carceral site. Moreover, the indefinite detention of disabled Indigenous persons on the basis of their disability builds upon and masks as ‘noncolonial’ settler colonial violence against Indigenous Australians. An analysis of how law orders, constructs and legitimates disabled carceral control troubles current understandings of indefinite detention, illuminates the limited notions of (in)justice that these understandings allow and provides new openings to acknowledging a fuller and more complex range of institutional injustices done to disabled offenders.

“Disarmed”: Disability, Trauma, and Emasculation in Contemporary Japanese Cinema

Disability, especially when war-related, is dangerous ground for entertainment films. Depictions of battle-scarred living bodies are necessarily political, since they cannot avoid commenting on the conflict of which they are a stark visual reminder. Yet depictions are politically multivalent: seeing the disabled has a wide range of effects on audiences. Unsurprisingly, then, disabled survivors of the war have rarely appeared on postwar screens. But the trend of avoiding the messy reality of war-related disability, and disabled bodies more generally, has ended, as the emphatic success of period drama Love and Honor (2006) can attest. In the new century, many films have tackled this once-taboo topic, winning success at the box office or, like Caterpillar (2010), at film festivals. In this article, I analyze depictions of disabled war survivors and other disabled bodies in recent Japanese films, drawing a contrast between Love and Honor and the aforementioned Caterpillar; I explore what motivated this more visceral retelling of both war trauma and general disability, and why each succeeded either commercially or critically. The trend towards depicting disability coincides perfectly with Japanese cinema’s resurgent success against Hollywood. Visceral depictions of traumatized bodies that are symbolically—or literally—disarmed have resonated with domestic audiences, perhaps because disability not only emasculates, it can also empower: the disabled, many believe, can speak with greater authority on the war or the human condition than anyone else. But what will they (be made to) say?

Disability in Charlotte Brontë’s Early Novellas, Jane Eyre and Villette: The Legacy of Finic’s Disabled and Racialized Body

In The Foundling (1833), Charlotte Brontë introduces Finic as a ‘deaf-mute’ dwarf whose body acts as a microcosm of nineteenth-century views on disability and race. Influenced by Sir Walter Scott’s The Black Dwarf, Charlotte Brontë renders her dwarf deaf, and then in A Leaf from an Unopened Volume (1834) she links his disabilities to miscegenation. Whereas Finic’s disabled body is portrayed as abject, Charlotte Brontë elevates other physical disabilities, such as the storyteller’s club feet, for his disability connects him to Byron and Scott. Representations of disability in Charlotte Brontë’s juvenilia also inform her later portrayals of disability in Jane Eyre and Villette.

Her Body, Herland: Reproductive Health and Dis/topian Satire in Charlotte Perkins Gilman

ABSTRACT This article discusses Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915) as a work of medical fiction and partial sex education manual that engages in conversation with various Progressive-era reproductive health discourses, especially scientific sex education theory and the birth control movement. Sex education at the fin de siècle often drew upon biological texts rather than anatomical or medical texts as a way to teach reproductive health during a period of censorship under Comstock Law. Gilman's use of satire rescripts this popular comparative biology approach to sex education by using entomology rather than plant or animal biology. Through satirical inversion, parthenogenesis functions as a defense for female body autonomy—or “voluntary motherhood”—and access to birth control. Although Gilman was sincere in her feminist argument for basic reproductive rights, a feminist disability studies reading of satire in Herland reveals a eugenics approach that eliminates impaired or disabled bodies from utopia.

Girls’ Series Fiction and Popular Culture by Luella D’Amico

Reviewed by: Girls’ Series Fiction and Popular Culture by Luella D’Amico Anna Lockhart (bio) Luella D’Amico. Girls’ Series Fiction and Popular Culture. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016. Luella D’Amico’s impetus for her collection, Girls’ Series Fiction in Popular Culture, is what she sees as the erasure of series fiction in scholarly circles. In this chronologically ordered group of essays, she aims to show that girls’ series fiction reflects and informs popular culture and girlhood in essence. The essays give diligent attention to its subjects and shed light on unexamined corners of the genre. What distinguishes this group of essays from previous similar studies, which are still rare, is the way that the essays converse with each other in unexpected ways. Not only do the readings here illuminate some unexplored or unstudied works, but D’Amico has included a dynamic and diverse breadth of authors and focuses, allowing for the similarities and complications between seemingly disparate works in this genre to bounce off of each other—the mark of a good collection and skillful editor. Scholars and students of children’s literature as well as cultural criticism, American history, childhood, and girlhood studies will find this collection useful and interesting. The collection begins with Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. In her essay, “Louisa May Alcott’s Theater of Time,” Marlowe Daly-Galeano examines both the ways that time defines the series genre and this series especially, in that it [End Page 90] keeps readers waiting for the next installment, thus expanding the narrative and delaying its end. In serial fiction time it is both elastic and finite; while characters may stay the same age in a timeless world, their readers count on its extension to prolong the pleasure of reading and to delay closure. Motifs of performance and theater in Little Women—Alcott’s authorial narration of closing the curtains on certain chapters of the story, for example—make time itself an important element to the ways readers interact with the series. Building on this, Daly-Galeano explores how time and aging affect girls and women in particular, in the ways that the girls’ lives are prescribed based on expected milestones, for example, and anxieties surrounding women’s aging. Time also intersects with change in “Queering the Katy Series: Disability, Emotion, and Imagination in the Novels of Susan Coolidge.” There, Eva Lupold complicates dominant scholarship on Susan Coolidge’s Katy series that reads Katy’s paralysis as a problematic taming of a spirited girl into a properly domesticated woman. Lupold shows how Katy’s disability opens up possibilities for the girl and for readers. If the disabled body, and the female body, is abjected from the mainstream, disability “allows for the queering of traditional norms and the development of character” (38). Other essays show the ways that girls’ series registered changes in attitudes toward girls and labor in the early twentieth century. Christiane Farnan’s analysis of The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew looks at how the hardworking Polly Pepper, “wanted” and admired by family, employers, and peers, could serve as a model for readers to negotiate and garner value through “girl labor” in a patriarchal capitalism. Paige Gray’s article on L. Frank Baum’s series, Oz and the Aunt Jane books (published as Edith Van Dyne), demonstrates correlations between the evolution of the female journalist and Baum’s girl protagonists. In particular, she links women’s roles in the public sphere with the normalization and simultaneous novelty of “girl talk” that is made popular in series fiction for girls (72). Similarly, Linda Simon looks at the independent Cherry Ames, teenage nurse, in her paper “Cherry Ames: A New Woman for the 1940s.” These essays strike a balance between mere praise of the works as feminist triumphs and nuanced studies with historical context. Nancy Drew’s monolithic presence in series fiction is touched upon in fresh ways, as in Michael Cornelius’s “Nancy Drew’s Shadow,” which looks at the mystery-solving Trixie Belden, a less polished and thus more relatable descendent of Nancy. Carolyn Cocca, in “The Bob-Whites of the Belden-Wheeler Detective Agency,” submits that while the Trixie Belden series...

Zika: Grappling with Prognostic Un/certainty and Open Normativities

In this article, I investigate the logic of prognostic certainty by examining the media's enactment of Zika through four media moments: The Olympics, The Pope, The Senate, and The Millennials. Prognostic certainty refers to the idea that once we diagnose a body (fetus, child, adult) with a condition, we can predict the outcome of that condition on the living subject, regardless of sociocultural circumstances. In utilizing disability theory from Alison Kafer, Eli Clare, and Alexis Shotwell, I propose a politics of prognostic un/certainty in relation to Zika. If we embrace this politics of contagion in relation to Zika, we can enact a radical openness that allows space for Zika-affected children to thrive by providing comprehensive healthcare and creating a social world that eliminates as many barriers to inclusion for disabled bodies as possible. Yet with this comes the need for comprehensive scientific information about Zika and interventions to prevent Zika from affecting some populations more than others; embracing a radical openness about Zika does not mean ignoring its contagion but analyzing where and how it spreads and creating interventions that transcend national borders. Prognostic un/certainty captures the tensions that emerge by holding all of these values simultaneously.

The 2014 special educational needs and disability code of practice: old ideology into new policy contexts?

This article reveals the Foucauldian docile body manufactured within the Department for Education’s special educational needs and disability code of practice 2014 through employment of a theoretical lens of embodiment and an analytical focus on only three words. In problematizing the concepts of support, employment and independence, we seek to upend this docile body juxtaposing such against the active ‘non-productive’ disabled body. We conclude that the Code is riven with ideological assumptions which act as a constraint to the location, form and function of the body. Everybody’s body is sorted and graded according to its ability to fulfil a Conservative work ethic and contribute positively to a society in which bodies are not equally valued. The authors suggest that critical discourse analysis, informed by the outlined conceptualisation of embodiment, could be usefully applied in the critiquing of many policy and guidance documents.

《i-城志•我城05》的城市及身體空間書寫———兼論“後九七香港青年作家”的情感結構

LANGUAGE NOTE | Document text in Chinese; abstract also in English.
 西西《我城》面世30年後，潘國靈和謝曉虹以《我城05》寫出了一部新世紀的“i城”故事。小說通過再現發達資本主義香港的城市生活，寄寓了兩位作家對城市和身體空間的思考。本文分爲三部分：第一部分，通過細析《我城05》，探討潘國靈和謝曉虹在書寫“i城”時，如何呈現香港那深受資本形塑的城市空間，揭示香港在21世紀初成爲發達資本主義都市後的諸種空間特質。資本主義不僅按其邏輯塑造城市空間，身體空間亦在其支配之下，故第二部分聚焦於考察《我城05》中的“勞動身體”和“疾病身體”。潘、謝二人一方面批判資本主義通過教育把“勞動身體”物化，另一方面亦指出“疾病身體”藴含對資本主義的強大反思性／批判性力量。最後，本文把《我城05》與韓麗珠、李維怡、可洛等“後九七香港青年作家”的作品並讀，勾勒出他們的“情感結構”———抗拒資本在城市空間的無止境擴張。
 Thirty years after Xi Xi published her novel My City, Lawrence Pun Kwok-ling and Dorothy Tse Hiu-hung collaboratively wrote a story about the “i-city” and published it as a book entitled My City 05. Through their representation of the highly capitalistic city life of Hong Kong, the “i-city” reveals the authors’ thoughts on the city-space and body-space in Hong Kong. This article is divided into three parts. The first part explores and analyzes how their depiction of “i-city” shows the city-space of Hong Kong as highly capitalized, so as to reveal the spatial characteristics of Hong Kong in the early 21st century. The second part discusses the fact that it is not only the city-space that changes according to the system of capitalism, but the body-space is also under its control. This part thus focuses on the “working body” and “disabled body” in My City 05. On the one hand, Pun and Tse criticize capitalism by illustrating how it objectifies the “working body” through the education system, but on the other hand they demonstrate how the “disabled body” engages in reflection/criticism on capitalism. The third part of this article is a comprehensive reading of “post-1997 young Hong Kong writers” through the lens of the “structure of feelings,” that is, their resistance to the expanded influence of capitalism towards the city-space. This reading takes My City 05 as a central text and compares it with works by other writers such as Hon Lai-chu, Lee Wai-yi, and Ho Lok.

Transforming Home: parents’ experiences of caring for children on the autism spectrum in Tasmania, Australia

As the private dwelling becomes the preferred site of care for individuals with a variety of complex needs, there has been a burgeoning interest in housing adaptations and the impact on experiences of home. The majority of studies are situated within the contexts of ageing, the disabled body and chronic medical conditions. In this paper, we present the results of a self-directed photography pilot study exploring the experience of carers of children on the autism spectrum in Tasmania, Australia. The findings highlight the multifarious and exacting negotiations required to meet the complex and idiosyncratic needs of children with autism and those of other family members. A key theme is a heightened need for containment enacted through micro-scale modifications to the physical fabric and spatial organization of the dwelling and through less tangible but pervasive practices and routines. The multiple constraints and extensive impact on families emphasize an urgent need for targeted research, policy development and support for this population.

How the disabled body unites the national body: disability as ‘feel good’ diversity in urban India

This article analyzes both representations of disability in popular media and the role of disabled workers in urban India and demonstrates how the category of disability becomes a form of non-threatening ‘feel good’ diversity. Unlike other axes of difference such as class, caste, gender, sexuality, and religion, India’s disability rights movement, corporations, and mainstream media represent disability as largely apolitical. Drawing on Nehruvian ideals about ‘unity in diversity’, this article discusses how disability functions as a means of imagining and creating unity in India. As a result of skillful manipulation that collapses and conflates nationalist and neoliberal projects, the success of disabled people is considered to be synonymous with the success of the nation. This essay thus examines how thinking, feeling, and representing through disability provides a new way of conceptualizing the nation and critically engages with ideas and ideals of ‘disability publics’. Disability is rendered into a representation and while tension exists between feeling good and feeling bad, the specter of a contentious disability politics is kept at bay.