Literary and filmic depictions of the disabled reinforce an "ableist" ideology that classifies bodies as normal or abnormal--positive or negative. Disabled characters are often represented as aberrant or evil and are isolated or incarcerated. This book examines language in film, fiction and other media that perpetuates the representation of the disabled as abnormal or problematic. The author looks at depictions of disability--both disparaging and amusing--and discusses disability theory as a framework for reconsidering "normal" and "abnormal" bodies.

This title brings cultural disability studies and genre fiction studies into dialogue for the first time. Analysing representations of disability in contemporary science fiction, romance, fantasy, horror, and crime fiction, it offers new and transformative insights into both the workings of genre and the affective power of disability.

Using sources from a wide variety of print and digital media, this book discusses the need for ample and healthy portrayals of disability and neurodiversity in the media, as the primary way that most people learn about conditions. It contains 13 newly written chapters drawing on representations of disability in popular culture from film, television, and print media in both the Global North and the Global South, including the United States, Canada, India, and Kenya. Although disability is often framed using a limited range of stereotypical tropes such as victims, supercrips, or suffering patients, this book shows how disability and neurodiversity are making their way into more mainstream media productions and publications with movies, television shows, and books featuring prominent and even lead characters with disabilities or neurodiversity. Disability Representation in Film, TV, and Print Media will be of interest to all scholars and students of disability studies, cultural studies, film studies, gender studies, and sociology more broadly.

Comedy and humour have frequently played a key role in disabled people’s lives, for better or for worse. Comedy has also played a crucial part in constructing cultural representations of disability and impairments, contributing to the formation and maintenance of cultural attitudes towards disabled people, and potentially shaping disabled people’s images of themselves. As a complex and often polysemic form of communication, there is a need for greater understanding of the way we make meanings from comedy. This is the first book which explores the specific role of comedic film genres in representations of disability and impairment. Wilde argues that there is a need to explore different ways to synthesise Critical/Disability Studies with Film Studies approaches, and that a better understanding of genre conventions is necessary if we are to understand the conditions of possibility for new representational forms and challenges to ableism. After a discussion of the possibilities of a ‘fusion’ between Disability Studies and Film Studies, and a consideration of the relationships of comedy to disability, Wilde undertakes analysis of contemporary films from the romantic comedy, satire, and gross-out genres. Analysis is focused upon the place of disabled and non-disabled people in particular films, considering visual, audio, and narrative dimensions of representation and the ways they might shape the expectations of film audiences. This book is of particular value to those in Film and Media Studies, and Critical/Disability Studies, especially for those who are investigating more inclusive practices in cultural representation.

Analyzes the diverse roles and pervasive presence of disability in Latin American literature and film. Libre Acceso stages an innovative encounter between disciplines that have remained quite separate: Latin American literary, film, and cultural studies and disability studies. It offers a much-needed framework to engage the representation, construction, embodiment, and contestation of human differences, and provides tools for the urgent resignification of a robust and diverse Latin American literary and filmic tradition. The contributors discuss such topics as impairment, trauma, illness and the body, performance, queer theory, subaltern studies, and human rights, while analyzing literature and film from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, and Peru. They explore these issues through the work of canonical figures Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, João Guimarães Rosa, and others, as well as less well-known figures, including Mario Bellatin and Miriam Alves.

Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse develops a narrative theory of the pervasive use of disability as a device of characterization in literature and film. It argues that, while other marginalized identities have suffered cultural exclusion due to a dearth of images reflecting their experience, the marginality of disabled people has occurred in the midst of the perpetual circulation of images of disability in print and visual media. The manuscript's six chapters offer comparative readings of key texts in the history of disability representation, including the tin soldier and lame Oedipus, Montaigne's "infinities of forms" and Nietzsche's "higher men," the performance history of Shakespeare's Richard III, Melville's Captain Ahab, the small town grotesques of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio and Katherine Dunn's self-induced freaks in Geek Love. David T. Mitchell is Associate Professor of Literature and Cultural Studies, Northern Michigan University. Sharon L. Snyder is Assistant Professor of Film and Literature, Northern Michigan University.

Shakespearean Drama, Disability, and the Filmic Stare synthesizes Laura Mulvey’s male gaze and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s stare into a new critical lens, the filmic stare, in order to understand and analyze the visual construction of disability in adaptations of Shakespearean drama. The book explores the intersections of adaptation studies, film studies, Shakespeare studies, and disability studies to analyze twentieth and twenty-first century representations of both physical disability and ‘madness’ in global cinematic film, television film, and digital broadcast cinema in Shakespeare’s works. Shakespearean Drama, Disability, and the Filmic Stare argues that the filmic stare does not differentiate between male and female characters with disabilities, or between powerful and powerless figures in disability representation. This multi-disciplinary volume is ideal for disability studies scholars, Shakespeare scholars, and those interested in adaptations of Shakespeare’s famous works.