Disability and Identity in Film: Finding the Voices of the Disabled in Cinema

All art forms take some kind of control over the subject matter they represent and identities can be written into and not just onto the text depending upon the authorial subjectivity and the extent to which any subject may be objectified. Consequently, what is represented typically has little control over how it is represented beyond the textmakers’ methods of description and critique even if that description is grounded in some form of ontological research into that subject. This experience of subjects within a text is something we encounter regularly and it is usually tinged with the ideology of the textmaker, their own identity, and the motives they may have in creating the representation. The autobiography would, on the surface, appear to be an exception to the rule as the author recounts their own subjectivity but I would argue that even this form is not without its objectification of character because the autobiography, even those which purport to be ‘warts and all’, is fundamentally an egoistic text presenting the author and hero or heroine of their own drama. In addition to this, we have also have to recognise the role of ghost writers in constructing the ‘official’ inner world of many so-called autobiographical texts. [Taken from the first paragraph of the paper]