Disability

The study of moving-image representations of persons with disabilities (PWDs) is a young and vibrant subset of cinema and media studies, itself a relatively youthful field. The vast majority of books and articles on the subject were published in the 1990s or later and reflect a growing awareness of—indeed, hinge on the concept of—disability as a social construct. The research into film and disability is inextricably connected to the development of another interdisciplinary field of inquiry: disability studies, which emerged from the disability rights activism of the 1960s and 1970s and a desire to address concerns about ableist prejudice, discrimination, and indifference. Inspired to some extent by the developing fields of women’s studies and various minority studies (e.g., African American, Native American, queer), disability studies was hindered in its growth by the decades-long dominance of a certain way of thinking about disability called the medical model: the widespread, retrograde belief that disability is primarily a pathological problem to be overcome, not a socially constructed identity factor. With the establishment of the Society for Disability Studies in 1982, the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, and other key developments, however, the field matured significantly. University-level courses and scholarly journals dedicated to disability studies slowly but steadily increased across the United States, the United Kingdom, and other countries during this time. The field reached a milestone in 1993 when the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez hosted the first scholarly conference devoted to disability studies in the arts and humanities, and it arrived at another in 1998 when the University of Illinois at Chicago established the first PhD program in disability studies in the United States. The earliest studies that examined the construction of disability in moving-image media were quantitative in nature and published in old-line medical-model journals. They were largely the output of a particularly industrious scholar named E. Keith Byrd. Alone or, more often, in collaboration with a colleague, Byrd published a series of such studies during the late 1970s and 1980s. Bearing such titles as “Feature Films and Disability” and “Disability in Full-Length Feature Films” and appearing in such journals as Journal of Rehabilitation, International Journal of Rehabilitation Research, and Rehabilitation Literature, Byrd’s articles tended to be brief, numbers-heavy, and laced with less-than-telling insights. (Among the observations in one such study were “that the film industry does utilize a variety of disabilities in its dramatizations” and “that disability is not totally ignored by the film industry.”) His efforts marked a start, however, and the following studies pick up where Byrd’s work leaves off.