Studying Disability for a Better Cinema and Media Studies

Studying Disability for a Better Cinema and Media Studies Elizabeth Ellcessor (bio) and Bill Kirkpatrick If you are reading this, you are probably already on board with the study of difference. Gender, critical race theory, class analyses, postcolonialism, or queer studies are a part of your scholarship, or at least a grace note in your graduate education. (If you are not reading this, let us take a moment to say that you should be. You're missing much of the most exciting work in cinema and media studies.) Despite your best intentions, however, you may not have encountered critical studies of media and disability in any meaningful way. It is not just missing from our scholarship; there are few job calls for experts in media and disability, precious few graduate seminars, rarely even a unit on disability in undergraduate courses. Disability is not listed as an area of expertise when you join SCMS or as a keyword when you submit to its conference. Disability largely remains what Goggin and Newell fifteen years ago identified as a "lacuna" in our field.1 Rather than bemoan this state of affairs, we pose a challenge: start incorporating disability into your work. We call for a disability media studies that advances the field by integrating disability and able-bodiedness as a category of analysis for film and media scholars.2 End Page 139 Like feminist film and media theory, a disability perspective is not primarily about the study of representations. Over thirty years ago, Joan Scott had to explain to her colleagues that a gender perspective is not primarily about the ontology of sex differences; similarly, we want colleagues to realize that disability is not the ontology of impairment but, borrowing Scott's phrase, "a primary way of signifying relationships of power."3 We are not simply looking for "the cripple in the text"; we are interrogating the dynamics of power and normalization that produce certain kinds of bodies, sensoriums, and cognitivities as "able, normal, better" and others as "disabled, abnormal, worse." A disability perspective, then, is about decentering the physically and cognitively "normal" character, the "normal" viewer, the "normal" producer, and so on; this has profound consequences for the study of media texts, industrial practices, social relations, media policies, modes of reception, and the design of technologies and spaces. It is about rethinking the stories told, the writers and actors hired, the economics of industries, the politics of access and representation, and the range of possible readings (think "cripping the text" as analogous to "queering the text"). It is about listening to new voices and engaging in new political struggles over power and privilege. Disability raises fascinating new questions, offers intellectually compelling new perspectives, and reveals exciting new insights about media and society. Cinema and media studies as a whole can benefit if disability is better integrated into our working knowledges, routine frames of analysis, standard professional and pedagogical categories, curricula, and understandings of the archive. As the essays in this In Focus—and a growing body of scholarship elsewhere—abundantly demonstrate, the transformation is already under way. Here, then, are some ways that a disability lens can help transform cinema and media studies into a better version of itself. "Disability" Is an Operation of Power When most people hear "disability," they imagine an ontological medical impairment that, in an ideal world, would be "fixed." In contrast, scholars in disability studies understand disability as a condition of difference that has been produced through discourse, by the built environment, and through social relations.4 The classic example: a wheelchair user is not inherently "disabled" but rather is produced as "disabled" in the absence of ramps—a social and political choice. What is hegemonically understood as the normal, able body is, in this view, simply the "normate," Rosemarie Garland-Thomson's term for a privileged body, without stigma, that functions as a universal and unmarked type in a given society (analogous to "cis" in queer theory).5 End Page 140 By moving away from a singular medical model of disability that sees physical and cognitive difference as "impairment in need of a cure," and recognizing that all bodies are constructed and valuated according to shifting...