"The Deviant Body" - MA Thesis

David Lenchler Rasmussen The Deviant Body

Abstract

This thesis explores the role of the deviant body in contemporary media, including immigrant

literature and the Hollywood superhero blockbuster. By applying stigma and disability theory to

representations of these artistic expressions, I highlight the difference between high and popular

culture, especially in relation to how they represent the body.

I conclude that authors generally depict a more inclusive view of the extraordinary body,

inviting their audiences to vicariously experience the conditions of othered bodies. Hollywood

films, on the other hand, have to live up to its audience's expectations, which includes perpetuating

a stigmatizing view of the abnormal body. I find that these bodies are usually relegated to a one-

sided antagonistic role. In addition, I argue that the American monomyth found in Hollywood

fiction helps preserve an anti-democratic and exclusive attitude towards people who deviate from

the normate construction by enfreaking them. By using an example from the comic book industry, I

also show an example of a good representation of disability, but also find that this representation

was short-lived because of external pressure.

Although people with disabilities can function as a protagonist, my research finds that they

are often confined to a few archetypes. By representing disabled people as fully-developed

individuals instead of narrative devices meant to elicit strong emotion, artistic representations could

help break down social barriers instead of maintaining them.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my thesis supervisor Clara for spurring me on with words of encouragement

as well as the necessary amount of constructive criticism. I am also grateful for help provided by the

faculty at the English department at the University of Southern Denmark.

My girlfriend Anne has been extremely patient, overbearing and accomodating, especially in the

last six months, while my family has always offered a free haven when needed.

Finally, my friend and fellow student Peter has provided helpful advice and feedback, while

Daniel's skills helped create a better front page than I could ever have envisioned myself.

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Table of Contents

Introduction: Theorizing disability 4

- Immigrant Writers 7

- The Heroic Body 7

- Defining Disability 12

- Stigma 15

- Method 19

- Structure 20

- Thesis Statement 20

Chapter I: The Visceral Metaphor of the Immigrant Experience 22

- Junot Díaz: Stigmatized Immigrants 23

- The Violence of the Immigrant Experience 27

- Belicia's Buxom Body 29

- The Promised Land 33

- Yiyun Li: Mao's Playthings 36

- Ha Jin: Stigma and Tradition 40

- Summary 45

Chapter II: The Superhuman Body 48

- 300: Disqualification in Ancient Greece 48

- The Able-Bodied Hero: Embodying American Exceptionalism 54

- The Supercrip: Triumphant in the Face of Adversity 59

- Anatomy of Evil: The Villainous Body 62

- Bam! Sock! Pow! Depiction of Violence in Superhero Films 66

- Democratic Implications of the Superhero 70

- Summary 73

Conclusion 75

Works cited 79

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Introduction: Theorizing Disability

To have a disability is to be an animal, to be part of the Other. (Reader 8)

Just as the conceptualization of race, class, and gender shapes the lives of those who are not black, poor, or female, so the concept of disability regulates the bodies of those who are 'normal.' In fact, the very concept of normalcy by which most people (by definition) shape their existence is in fact tied inexorably to the concept of disability, or rather, the concept of disability is a function of a concept of normalcy. (Qtd. in Mitchell & Snyder 235)

According to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), 18.7% of Americans are currently

disabled and 12.6% severely disabled as of 2010 (Brault 4). In spite of the high occurence of bodily

deviation, cultures have often discriminated on the basis of corporal difference. In Nazi Germany,

Jewish people were depicted as monstrous beings (fig. 1), which stripped them of humanity and

justified their persecution. Such a process is called enfreakment, “the cardinal principle” of which is

“that the body envelops and obliterates the freak's potential humanity” (Thomson 59).

Figure 1: Collage of pictures meant to dehumanize their respective subjects.1

1 Jewish caricature retrieved from psu.edu as of August 20, 2013.

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Political cartoons, and cartoons in general, often present the antagonist's body as ugly or deformed

in order to inspire negative reactions from the audience. In this thesis, I will attempt to show how

different kinds of storytellers create sympathy, antipathy and empathy by using the body as a

platform for communicative strategies.

In order to do so, I will draw upon the vocabulary and terminology of disability studies,

since part of this relatively new field of study specializes in deconstructing our perceptions of other

bodies. It is important for me to stress that this is but one aspect of disability studies, since other

scholars invest tremendous effort in disability activism and trying to right perceived slights. In this

thesis, however, I am more interested in finding out why human beings baulk at the sight of what

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has termed “extraordinary bodies” in her book with this title (1997).

In Bending Over Backwards (2002), Lennard J. Davis, one of the figureheads of contemporary

disability studies, argues that the field has moved from the area of social studies to that of

“humanities, popular culture, literary theory, and so on” (43). It is within the bounds of American

popular culture that I will attempt to decode the connotations tied to the abnormal bodies as they

appear in modern fiction. In so doing, I will determine what effect the “cult of the normal” (ibid.

39) has on the cultural artifacts produced today.

Disability studies emerged as a result of the injuries sustained by soldiers during the

Vietnam War, which prompted an ontological re-examination of illness and impairments and

resulted in the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (Davis, Bending 11). Since then, it has

evolved as an academic field, to the point where “disability is not only accepted but also has

become very much a critical term in discussions of being, post-humanism, political theory,

transgender theory, philosophy and the like” (Davis, “Introduction” xiii). Proponents of disability

studies, such as Michael Bérubé, find it hard to imagine a world without it: “the subject will be

African-American caricature retrieved from ferris.edu as of August 25th, 2013.Japanese caricature retrieved from dartmouth.edu as of August 25th, 2013.

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central to human existence for as long as humans have bodies – and embodied minds to theorize

them with” (Davis, “Introduction” x). The human body itself is the raison d´être for disability

studies.

The ubiquity of disability means that storytellers are able to use it as a narrative tool, which

is the focus of this thesis. I intend to find out how authors and filmmakers use the body as a

communicative tool, drawing upon disability-related connotations to elicit calculated responses

from their respective audiences. Moreover, I will examine the consequences of this usage of

disabled characters so as to determine if they are relegated to a supporting role or are they

developed characters. Furthermore, I will determine the difference between bodily representation in

prose and in film. In this thesis, I have chosen to focus on two ostensibly disparate examples as

representatives of their respective genres: the immigrant novel and the Hollywood superhero

blockbuster. My main claim is that, both in prose and on film, storytellers draw upon subtexts of

disability to provoke a reaction in the audience or to flesh out a character efficiently, most often a

villain. By examining both popular literature and popular film, I hope to detect differing attitudes

towards the human body by encompassing a variety of contemporary fiction. Additionally, I wish to

establish what these pieces of fiction say about disability, inclusion and democracy, either implicitly

or explicitly.

The overall aim is to apply disability studies terminology to manifestations of contemporary

popular culture. My thesis works within the framework of disability studies, since one of the aims

of the field is to question the notion of normalcy: “Disability studies demands a shift from the

ideology of normalcy, from the rule and hegemony of normates, to a vision of the body as

changeable, unperfectable, unruly, and untidy” (Davis, Bending 39). I will reinforce my arguments

with passages from analyzed works. Due to the nature of film, I will also use visual art to illustrate

my points. Furthermore, I will offer historical contexts and interviews in order to determine the

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intentions of the storytellers.

Immigrant Writers

In order to apply disability theory to contemporary literature, I have chosen to narrow my analysis

to a number of immigrant authors: Junot Díaz, Yiyun Li and Ha Jin. Díaz will be the central

character of my literary analysis, with Li and Jin providing different perspectives, so that Díaz does

not come to represent the genre by himself.

To date, Díaz has published one novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) and

two short story collections, Drown (1997) and This Is How You Lose Her (2012). Díaz is a

Dominican-American writer, whose books always include immigration as a central theme. The

author himself came to the United States after having been raised by a militant father in the

immediate aftermath of the tyrannical Trujillo's assassination. Since Díaz's writings mediate life in

the Dominican Republic as well as in the US, I will examine the difference in how the body is

represented in these contrasting environments. While Díaz draws on many of his personal

experiences to flesh out his narratives, the purpose of this chapter is not to offer a biographical

reading, but rather to establish the role of the human body within the genre of immigrant literature.

Díaz's writings will be juxtaposed with Yiyun Li's short story collection A Thousand Years of

Good Prayers (2005) and Ha Jin's novel Waiting (1999). Both of these authors were born in China,

but chose to settle in the US later in life. By analyzing these works, I will determine if the

immigrant experience of Díaz's Dominican-Americans is unique, or if it is possible to draw some

parallels between these minorities. As in the case of Junot Díaz's collections, I have chosen to focus

on the short stories which resonate more strongly in the context of disability studies.

The Heroic Body

To provide a counterpoint to the immigrant writers, I have chosen to examine the attitude towards

the (super)human body in Hollywood films, primarily those that are part of the wave of comic

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book-inspired superhero blockbusters that have dominated at the box office since the success of

Sam Raimi's film Spider-Man (2002). I will use examples from film adaptations that are part of this

wave of films, notably Zack Snyder's two films 300 (2007) and Man of Steel (2013) as well as

Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, consisting of Batman Begins (2005), The Dark Knight (2008),

and The Dark Knight Rises (2012). Most of these films have received moderate to positive reviews,

but each of them have made at least twenty million dollars at the box office, with The Avengers

earning more than triple that amount. For some reason, this genre resonates with contemporary

movie-goers. I will examine what the consequence may be for people with disabilities.

I will primarily investigate three aspects of the Hollywood superhero blockbuster, the body

of the hero, the representation of the antagonists, and the violence that occurs between these figures.

By scratching the polished surface of these computer-augmented films, I intend to describe the

narrative usage of disabled characters to further the plot.

While I realize that the superhero genre is quite disparate from that of immigrant literature, I

believe applying disability theory to two rather different cultural manifestations will illustrate the

universality of disability studies. Furthermore, this specific genre can prove particularly useful

when it comes to decoding American attitudes towards the human body. I believe this genre is

relevant for several reasons: First of all, including different sources will reveal different approaches

to how the body is understood. In addition, the current wave of superhero films is an ongoing

artistic movement, which means that, academically, it has yet to be scrutinized. As in the case of

Junot Díaz's fiction, the contemporary nature of the films make them relevant for discussion and for

gauging the attitude towards disability found within.

Second, the genre seems an obvious focus for disability studies and stigma theory because of

the central role the human body plays in it. Superheroes, as the name suggests, are always deviants

from the normate character. The very word “super” definitely carries positive connotations,

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especially when juxtaposed with “disability.” However, the genre at times threaten to make the

superhero a pariah because of his deviation, even if it is one based in desirable traits. The heroes are

nearly always portrayed as loners facing the dilemma of choosing whether to intervene in a conflict.

Junot Díaz even likens the situation of immigrants to that of superheroes: “You really want to know

what being an X-Man feels like? Just be a smart bookish boy of color in a contemporary U.S.

ghetto. Mamma mia! Like having bat wings or a pair of tentacles growing out of your chest” (Díaz,

Oscar Wao 22). In both cases, what makes the audience connect is the universal theme of

stigmatization.

Third, I believe this is a viable area of study because of Tom Pettitt and Lars Ole Sauerberg's

writings on the Gutenberg Parenthesis, which, according to Dean Starkman's article “The Future is

Medieval,” is characterized by “the idea that the digital age, rather than solely a leap into the future,

also marks a return to practices and ways of thinking that were central to human societies before

Johannes Gutenberg's 15th century invention changed human literacy and the world” (Starkman).

Pettitt and Sauerberg argue that the centuries-long focus on books was a “parenthesis”, and that we

are now experiencing a move away from the authority of the book as a medium:

Sauerberg: New hierarchies will emerge. We're looking for the urge of authority, the need for points of

orientaton.

Pettitt: And the authority of the book, the authority of the medium. In the parenthesis, the medium itself

guaranteed authority because of its nature and solidness. This flattening out means that books are not

more important than other forms of communication. (Starkman)

In relation to my argument, the notion of the Gutenberg Parenthesis is important because it strips

the novel itself of authority as the prime signifier of the zeitgeist. As a result, the novel has to share

its previously unrivalled hegemony with other media. The diversity and equality in importance of

media echoes disability scholars' hope for acceptance of diversity when it comes to human bodies.

The result, according to the interviewer Dean Starkman, is unknown: “With the book what do we

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get? We get the Scientific Revolution, we get the Enlightenment and we got democracy. We got the

Declaration of Independence, and Freud and everyone else. Before the parenthesis what did we

have? We had the Dark Ages” (ibid.). He is right in the sense that authority must be found

elsewhere, but as Sauerberg remarks, “perhaps we get diversity, first and foremost” (ibid.).

The movement towards media equality may also be taken as a democratic tendency towards

a world in which one medium is not inherently superior to another. Graphic novels stand to benefit

from this, since they “fuse text and art, which offers value, variety, and a new medium for literacy”

(Bucher & Manning 68). To modern readers, who have grown up with audiovisual media, this may

seem a natural evolution of the book medium: “the graphic novel gives us the subtlety and intimacy

we get from good literary books while providing the speed of apprehension and the excitingly

scrambled, hybrid reading experience we get from watching, say, computer screens that are full of

visuals as well as text” (Tabachnick 25). Díaz agrees with this view and admits that his books are

inspired by superhero fiction: “Someone like me, why can't the popular culture of my day be as

valid and have as much of a place in my work as, let's say, you know, Garcia Marquez looking at

Kafka […] Kafka's nice, but I grew up with Spider-Man” (Deadline).

The idea of postmodernism, as presented by Fredric Jameson in his Postmodernism or, the

Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), is tied to Pettitt and Sauerberg's notion of the Gutenberg

parenthesis. One of postmodernism's important attributes, according to Jameson, is its fusion of

high and low culture: “The postmodernisms have, in fact, been fascinated precisely by this whole

'degraded' landscape of schlock and kitsch, [...] materials they no longer simply 'quote,' as a Joyce

or a Mahler might have done, but incorporate into their very substance” (Jameson 2-3).

“Schlock and kitsch” are ubiquitous in Western culture, which suggests that a paradigm shift

from postmodernism, perhaps towards Davis' dismodernism, has not yet taken place. According to

Junot Díaz, postmodernism is still the dominant culture in American literary circles: “We're talking

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about the United States, man! Unless you write a book about a wizard, a vampire or a dog, for the

most part you're only being read by a very select group of readers” (Deadline). As Pettitt and

Sauerberg surmise, the power of the novel has been challenged. Popular sensibilities have long

since moved from classical works of fiction to the more mainstream, illustrated by the success of

the superhero film genre. Besides, it is hard to determine which cultural artifacts will be thought of

as canonical in the future. In the Deadline interview, Díaz mentions that he writes for the future, and

that the writer never knows whether his work will create a meaningful emotional response in the

mind of his audience. This, of course, goes for other artists as well; William G. Doty has argued that

“rituals, symbols, and myths establish conservative benchmarks, but at the same time, they

anticipate forms of the future as they determine and shape ideals and goals for both individual and

society” (Qtd. in Jewett & Lawrence 9). Art does not only imitate life, it also seeks to pinpoint the

direction of contemporary culture. In The Myth of the American Superhero (2002), John Shelton

Lawrence and Robert Jewett argue that what is now deemed classic works of art was once thought

of as popular culture:

In seeking a precise grasp of monomythic content, we occasionally compare popular materials with items

drawn from what is sometimes called ”high culture” – usually the pop culture of an earlier era. We do not

mean to suggest that classical literature is always superior to current pop material in its insights, or that

the two realms should be kept in hermetically sealed compartments. Both high and popular culture can

show self-conscious attentiveness to the myths of their time, each revealing them in distinctive ways. For

the vigor of each and the health of the larger culture that contains them both, we suggest that it is

preferable that they be responsive to one another. (13)

I have chosen to include conspicuous examples of both high and popular culture in order to

determine how disability is used as a narrative device in each. Jewett, Lawrence and Díaz have all

accepted mainstream culture as something to be included rather than scoffed at.

The fact that superhero films are drawing vast crowds to the box office and setting records

for tickets sold might not necessarily mean that we are talking about important works of art (a

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general consensus probably will not be reached until the current wave of superhero fiction

diminishes), but it nevertheless indicates that the superhero genre strikes a chord with contemporary

audiences, perhaps because of their post-9/11 imagery. Thus, superheroes “can be compared to the

heroic figures in classical mythology,” (Bucher & Manning 68) and the tales they are part of serve

the same function then and now, to delight and instruct.

Defining Disability

According to ADA, disability is defined as fitting neatly into three domains, communicative, mental

and physical in nature. Examples of these could be, respectively, blindness, deafness or stuttering;

Alzheimer's disease or senility; wheelchair usage or arthritis (ibid. 2). This terminology is

challenged by the British model, which differentiates between impairment and disability: “An

impairment involves a loss or diminution of sight, hearing, mobility, mental ability, and so on. But

an impairment only becomes a disability when the ambient society creates environments with

barriers – affective, sensory, cognitive or architectural” (Davis, Bending 41). Rosemarie-Garland

Thomson echoes this viewpoint in Extraordinary Bodies, in which she defines disability as “a

reading of bodily particularities in the context of social power relations” (6). What the American

government terms disability in ADA is not recognized as such by many disability scholars, who

refer to the same concept as impairment. In this thesis, I will be referring to disability and

impairment as the British model defines them, since this has broadly been accepted by the academic

community.

Scholars have attempted to chronicle the methods used to understand disability. The most

important of these are the medical, charity and social models. The charity model entails viewing

people with disabilities as “poor, destitute creatures in need of the help of the church” (Davis,

Bending 12), while the medical model categorizes the same people as “helpless victims of disease in

need of the correction offered by modern medical procedures” (ibid.). An illustration of this notion

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is the attempt to cure homosexuality through conversion therapy, which enfreaks queerness as a

mental disorder. Some disability scholars, such as Tobin Siebers, argue that attempts should be

made to cure the discrimination in society instead (25).

An application of the above models to storytelling can be found in Preston Blair's Cartoon

Animation (1994). Blair was an animator on the Disney classic Fantasia (1940). In Cartoon

Animation, he offers his views on how to influence the audience: “The value of animators' work is

determined by their ability of their characters to sway the emotions of the audience” (7). Because of

the visual nature of the animator's job, his success hinges on representing the body in a way which

influences the audience's opinion.

Figure 2: Blair's dissection of what makes a drawn character appear 'cute' to the human eye. (Blair 32)

Blair's “cute character” (fig. 2) is related to Davis' notion of the charity model in the atittudes

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expected from others. The drawing shows that storytellers use the pre-programmed cultural notions

of worthy and unworthy bodies to create narrative meaning. When Blair guides the aspiring writer

to “always” draw small noses and mouths, he implies that the audience would not find the infant

with a bigger nose or mouth as cute. Blair's cute character, like the charity model, perpetuates an

invisible hierarchy of bodies which are perceived to be objectively superior, and the abnormal body,

which is to be pitied and treated with charity. If the baby had some sort of deviating trait, such as a

cleft or an additional digit on one foot, the medical model suggests normalizing the body by surgery

or medicine, in order to avoid stigma.

In the social model, which for a long time was accepted by most disability scholars,

“disability is presented as a social and political problem that turns an impairment into an oppression

either by erecting barriers or by refusing to create barrier-free environments” (Davis, Bending 23).

Barriers, in this case, could be the lack of ramps for wheelchairs or Braille numbering in an

elevator. The social model relates to the British model because both of them claim that disability is

a social process rather than bodily deviance. Recently, the social model has been challenged. In an

essay in The Disability Studies Reader, Tom Shakespeare suggests that the model has played its

part, which he acknowledges has been important (220). One of the problems, according to him, is

that the social model “so strongly disowns individual and medicap approaches, that it risks

implying that impairment is not a problem” (218). Disability studies is a relatively young area of

study. The terminology and paradigms are still evolving, and the purpose of this thesis is not to

discuss the future of the field, but rather to determine the current state of affairs in American culture

by way of analysing its artistic tendencies. Although the works I will be working with has been

limited, mostly due to the restricted nature of the thesis, I have chosen popular or critically

acclaimed works in the hope that they represent artistic tendencies.

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Stigma

An important concept within disability studies is the normal/abormal dichotomy. Since people with

disabilities are often perceived as others, a considerable amount of research has been dedicated to

examine these concepts. In Extraordinary Bodies, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson coins the term

normate: “The term normate usefully designates the social figure through which people can

represent themselves as definitive human beings. Normate, then, is the constructed identity of those

who, by way of the bodily configurations and cultural capital they assume, can step into a position

of authority and wield the power it grants them” (8). Thomson's normate is heavily inspired by

Erving Goffman's “unblushing male,” who is described in Stigma: Notes on the Management of

Spoiled Identity (1963) as a “a young married, white, urban, northern, heterosexual Protestant father

of college education, fully employed, of good complexion, weight and height and a recent record in

sports” (153). The intended irony is that very few, if any, people will match Goffman's description.

As such, everybody becomes a deviant from the prototypical American, the normate. Davis

underlines the absurdity of the normate construct when he claims that “the most oppressed person in

the world is a disabled female, Third World, homosexual, woman of color” (Davis, Bending 29).

This hypothetical character would be a victim of stigmatization, which is “the situation of the

individual who is disqualified from full social acceptance” (Goffman 9). The disqualification would

be based on the individual's possession of a stigma, defined as “an attribute that makes him different

from others in the category of persons available for him to be, and of a less desirable kind – in the

extreme, a person who is quite thoroughly bad, or dangerous, or weak. He is thus reduced in our

mind from a whole and usual person to a tainted, discounted one” (Goffman 12). Goffman's notion

of stigma tries to universalize all discrimination under the umbrella of his theory. Thus, Stigma

makes it possible to understand sexism, racism, classism and ableism as manifestations of the same

social functions which causes social groups to expel otherness. Ableism is the act of disqualifying

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“on the basis of mental and physical differences, first selecting and then stigmatzing them as

disabilities” (Siebers 27). Disability, then, is part of identity studies, just as African American,

queer and feminist studies before it.

In Disability Aesthetics (2010), Tobin Siebers suggests that disability, unlike other oppressed

minorities, may serve as “the master trope of disqualification, not because disability theory is

superior to race, class or sex/gender theory, but because all oppressive systems function by reducing

human variation to deviancy and inferiority defined on the mental and physical plane” (Siebers 27).

Oppression works by pathologizing minorities, claiming, for instance, that Africans-Americans are

lazy, women are weak, or that homosexuals are AIDS-infected. In this way, the hegemonic normate

legitimizes the oppression of his perceived inferiors by assigning stigmas to them. Where disability

does differentiate from other minorities is in its very nature. Whereas race, gender and sexual

orientation are all relatively fixed, disability is an ever-present threat. A speeding car, for instance,

can remove an individual's normate status in a moment. The threat seems universal when factoring

in impairments that are often side-effects of old age, such as reduced eyesight, hearing and mobility

(Thomson 14).

Because of the changing nature of the body, Davis suggests a paradigm shift, from

postmodernism to what he terms dismodernism: “The dismodern era ushers in the concept that

difference is what all of us have in common. That identity is not fixed but malleable. That

technology is not separate but part of the body. That dependence, not individual independence, is

the rule” (Davis, Bending 26). Dismodernism, then, is even more fragmented than postmodernism,

since it acknowledges the unique nature of every body. “Disability” itself is an awkward term,

which is held together by the treatment of stigmatized individuals by the normate hegemony.

Cosmetic diseases, that might not be classified as a disability, such as acne, can also bring

with it stigmatization and result in psychological scars. Goffman explains that a stigmatic trait is not

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necessarily problematic because of any inherent negative attribute caused by the stigma itself.

Rather, the problem lies in the way the stigmatized individual is treated by those who identify

themselves as normates: “The term stigma, then, will be used to refer to an attribute that is deeply

discrediting, but it should be seen that a language of relationships, not attributes, is really needed”

(Goffman 13). As Lennard J. Davis puts it in the introduction to his Disability Studies Reader

(2013), “the 'problem' is not the person with disabilities; the problem is the way that normalcy is

constructed to create the 'problem' of the disabled person” (1).

That a problem exists is due to the tyranny of the majority. In an essay from The Disability

Studies Reader, Lerita Coleman Brown argues that “those possessing power, the dominant group,

can determine which human differences are desired and undesired” (Brown 148). Consequently,

people who deviate from the normate template find themselves reduced to a single stigmatic trait

such as being coded as “a redhead” or “a cripple” instead of a person with red hair, a person with a

disability, which expresses the normate uses to articulate the distance betwen himself and the other

(ibid.). This is connected to the process of enfreakment, which makes the body into an “icon of

pathology with only a trace of the human remaining” (Thomson 77). Brown adds that stigma is

dependent on the hegemonic culture: “moving from one social or cultural context to another can

change both the definitions and the consequences of stigma” (149). Being black, for instance, is

often a source of stigma in Western culture, but that would not be the case in an African country

with a vast majority of black citizens.

According to Davis, the problems posed by disability are due to the inter-body relationships,

which echoes Siebers' definition of aesthetics: “Aesthetics tracks the sensations that some bodies

feel in the presence of other bodies” (1). Bodies, to him, are both human bodies, but also objects of

art, and his focus is on the visceral response one body might provoke from another. The role of art,

to Siebers, is to “expand the spectrum of humanity that we will accept among us” (10). This is one

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of the goals of this thesis, to establish whether modern popular culture works to include or exclude

human beings who deviate from the norm. To succesfully communicate a deviant experience of life,

artists may use narrative tools such as standpoint theory, which Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has

borrowed from feminist literary theory: “Standpoint theory and the feminist practice of explicitly

situating oneself when speaking thus allow for complicating inflections such as disability, or, more

broadly, body configuration – attributions such as fat, disfigured, abnormal, ugly, or deformed – to

enter into our considerations of identity and subjectivity” (Thomson 24). Using standpoint theory

presupposes that storytellers are willing to create protagonists whose bodies are somehow marked.

In an essay published in The Disability Studies Reader, David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder

argue that in fiction, there is often a one-to-one relationship between appearance and inner life; the

ugly person is morally decrepit, the beautiful person virtuous. This is a continuation of the

eighteenth-century pseudo-science of physiognomics, a sort of body criticism, which meant that

“Speculative qualities such as moral integrity, honesty, trustworthiness, criminality, fortitude,

cynicism, sanity, and so forth, suddenly became available for scrutiny by virtue of the 'irregularities'

of the body that enveloped them” (230). A classic example of physiognomocs in literature can be

found in Shakespeare's character, Richard III, who had a deformed body and therefore a twisted

sense of morality.

While physiognomics may seem archaic to modern eyes, it has been suggested that

mainstream fiction have had difficulty of letting go of this easy method of moral categorization:

“Focusing on a body feature to describe a character throws the reader into a confrontation with the

character that is predetermined by cultural notions about disability […] representation tends to

objectify disabled characters by denying them any opportunity for subjectivity or agency”

(Thomson 11). Therefore it becomes important to examine how storytellers treat disability. On the

one hand, if we accept the notion that fiction, on some level, is a mimetic remediation of reality, the

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stories we are told may have the power to shape the audience's perception of people with

disabilities. On the other hand, if American society has reached a point at which storytellers are

willing to mediate an experience of bodily stigmatization, it could potentially have a positive effect.

The study of physiognomics is related to Melville J. Lerner's just world hypothesis, which

states that “Individuals have a need to believe that they live in a world where people generally get

what they deserve” (Lerner & Miller 1030). If human beings think in this way, the consequences are

potentially devastating to disabled and otherwise disenfranchised people, since the implication is

that they somehow deserve their current state of affairs. Although physiognomics no longer exists

as a viable field of study, the line of thought on which the just world hypothesis rests means that, at

the back of people's minds, stigmatization is justifiable. In extension of this idea, Tobin Siebers sees

“disqualification” as “a symbolic process removes individuals from the ranks of quality human

beings, putting them at risk of unequal treatment, bodily harm, and death” (Siebers 23). The danger

posed to people with disabilities is real, “since by all estimates the majority of people with disability

are poor, unemployed, and undereducated” (Davis, Bending 28). As such, stigmatization,

disqualification and the just world view threaten to keep these people at the bottom of the social

hierarchy.

Method

In order to determine how narratives benefit from disability imagery, I will contrast two major

cultural movements: immigrant literature and the Hollywood superhero film. These genres will be

analyzed independently within the theoretical framework of disability studies, with further insights

gathered from interviews and critical essays. Because of the visual nature of the superhero film

genre, I will use still images from these works in order to illustrate how certain types of bodies are

used for certain narrative archetypes.

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Structure

Chapter I of this thesis examines how American immigrant writers draws upon images of disability

to bridge the gap of experience between the normate and the racial and bodily other. I argue that

disability is a universal experience and thus a fitting narrative solution to the problem of different

spheres of experience.

In chapter II I examine the representation of deviant bodies in popular culture as exemplified

by the vastly succesful superhero film genre. My argument is that these films help perpetuate power

relations which work to keep others at the bottom of the social hierarchy by depicting otherness as

an alien form that serves to either empower the hero or dehumanize the villain. Furthermore, I argue

that this is a standard American myth and thus an important aspect of American self-understanding.

The democratic implications of representing the hero as able-bodied and the villain as othered are

also discussed here.

Finally, the thesis is concluded by discussing my findings and elucidating the consequence

for othered bodies in contemporary society, as well as suggesting how artists may alter their

narratives to include otherness instead of demonizing it.

Thesis Statement

This thesis examines how storytellers use the body, in prose and in film, to manipulate the opinion

of the audience. Immigrant writers use corporal punishment in writing as a method of conveying the

immigrant's plight to the normative reader. By conveying culturally specific troubles through the

universal medium of the human body, they are thus able to expand the horizon of a culturally distant

readership.

While modern literature has been financially relegated as a mode of entertainment by the

Hollywood blockbusters. However, Hollywood films are expected to make hundreds of millions of

dollars at the box office and therefore, artistic aspirations are stifled. Mainstream filmmakers are not

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encouraged to experiment artistically and stick to a proven formula in order to maximize revenue.

Physical depictions of superheroes and villains are part of this formula, and perpetuate a dichotomic

view of healthy and sick, which disqualifies physical otherness, making people with disabilities the

scapegoat of popular culture.

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Chapter I: The Visceral Metaphor of the Immigrant Experience

Every day he watched the 'cool' kids torture the crap out of the fat, the ugly, the smart, the poor, the dark, the black, the unpopular, the feminino, the gay – and in every one of these clashes he saw himself. (Díaz, Oscar Wao 264).

I have come to see that almost any literary work will have some reference to the abnormal, to disabilty, and so on. I would explain this phenomenon as a result of the hegemony of normalcy. (Davis, ”Introduction” 10).

Mostly, I stayed in the basement, terrified that I would end up abnormal. (Díaz, Drown 82)

Immigrant literature is an important aspect of American culture due to the country's lure and the

unique notion of the American dream. While many families, and ethnicities, have been settled in the

country for generations, waves of immigrants still sacrifice much in order to go to the US in times

of crisis in their homeland. Throughout the 2000's, the foreign-born population in the United States

rose steadily until the number reached nearly 38 million by the beginning of 2009.

Figure 3: Estimate of foreign-born population in America.2

Accordingly, immigrant literature continues to be an extremely relevant source for the

understanding of American culture and mentality. The canon includes important works such as

Mary Antin's The Promised Land (1912) and Mike Gold's Jews Without Money (1930), both of

2 Retrieved from migrationinformation.org as of August 15, 2013.

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which exemplify the autobiographical nature of the genre. These autobiographical elements are vital

for providing a voice for the marginalized demographics of American society. Providing a voice for

others is a relatively new trend, since “women, African-Americans, Native Americans, and

immigrants [...] have often been excluded from the literary canon” (Morton and Duncan xi).

Junot Díaz: Stigmatized Immigrants

Junot Díaz's fiction revolves around the pseudo-autobiographical character Yunior, but the

characters age, job situation and the nature of his important romantic and familial relationships

change from book to book, and sometimes from short story to short story within the same book. The

only constant is his name, although some elements recur, such as his brother Rafa and an absent

father figure. Díaz uses Yunior as the anchor in his writing: “I think I have him locked down in an

okay way. My idea, ever since Drown, was to write six or seven books about him that would form

one big novel. You connect This is How You Lose Her to Drown to The Brief Wondrous Life of

Oscar Wao, and you can read this thing” (Ross). In Díaz's writings to date, Yunior acts as a

mouthpiece through which Díaz can share his personal immigrant experience.

In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the eponymous protagonist suffers from multiple

stigmas: Not only is he a racial other in white America, he is also shunned for his 'nerdy' interests,

his obesity (Díaz, Oscar Wao 15) and his sexual inexperience, which makes him “un-Dominican”

(ibid. 11) and thus disqualifies him from participation in his ethnic society.

Erving Goffman differentiates between the visible and invisible stigma, terming them

“discredited” and “discreditable” (14). Oscar's stigmatization is due to several physical and mental

traits, some of which are discredited and some of which are discreditable. His race and obesity are

discredited, since he cannot deny them and is excluded by the white children on that basis: “The

white kids looked at his black skin and his afro and treated him with inhuman cheeriness. The kids

of color, upon hearing him speak and seeing him move his body, shook their heads. You're not

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Dominican” (Díaz, Oscar Wao 49). His geeky nature and sexual inexperience may not be

immediately apparent, but he is cast out by his fellow Dominicans as soon as these discreditable

traits surface. Without any peers, Oscar emerges as a liminal character, belonging neither with

American citizens or with his fellow immigrants. By making his protagonist obese, Díaz defies

normative constructions of protagonists: “There is virtually no major protagonist in a novel written

during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who is in some ways physically marked with a

disability” (Bending over Backwards 95). While the trend may have been somewhat reversed, most

protagonists are still an incarnation of the everyman.

Oscar is aware of his stigmatized status and does what he can to change at least some of it:

“his cool-index, already low, couldn't have survived that kind of paliza, would have put him on par

with the handicapped kids and with Joe Locorotundo, who was famous for masturbating in public”

(Díaz, Oscar Wao 17). Díaz illustrates how stigmatization affects both racialized, handicapped and

sexual deviants: all of them socially disabled because of their exclusion from society. The tyrannical

nature of normalcy forces Oscar to alter his discreditable personality and discredited body to better

suit society's expectations. “A couple of months earlier, after a particularly nasty bout with the

Darkness, he'd started another one of his diets and combined it with long lumbering walks around

the neighborhood, and guess what? The nigger stuck with it and lost close on twenty pounds!”

(Díaz, Oscar Wao 270-271). When Oscar tries to rid himself of his stigmatized traits, his actions

correspond with Goffman's notion of shame, which, to the stigmatized individual “becomes a

central possibility, arising from the individual's perception of one of his own attributes as being a

defiling thing to possess, and one he can readily see himself as not possessing” (Goffman 18).

Oscar attempts to lose weight several times. The process is complicated by normates, who

have no interest in seeing a stigmatized individual become comparably normal: “You think people

hate a fat person? Try a fat person who's trying to get thin. Brought out the motherfucking balrog in

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niggers” (Díaz, Oscar Wao 177). Goffman and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson claim that human

beings attempt to keep others hierarchically below themselves because stigmatized individuals

serve as an antithesis to their self-understanding: “The very act of representing corporeal otherness

places them in a frame that highlights their differences from ostensibly normate readers” (Thomson

10). By favorably contrasting themselves with Oscar's body, and stigmatized bodies in general, the

normates create a definition of themselves by ruling out what they are not: “Stigmatization creates a

shared, socially maintained and determined conception of a normal individual, what I earlier termed

a normate, sculpted by a social group attempting to define its own character and boundaries”

(Thomson 31). Díaz frames Osacar as the inverse of Thomson's normate, but does so in order to

create an imperfect hero. Díaz succeeds in creating a relatable protagonist in spite of Oscar's

stigmatization precisely because his otherness makes him a compelling character. David Mitchell

and Sharon Snyder argue that ”Narrative interest solidifies only in the identification and pursuit of

an anomaly that inaugurates the exceptional tale or the tale of exception” (227). By situating Oscar

in an extraordinary body and making him separate from society, he makes Oscar all the fascinating.

It is possible to read Díaz's fiction as an intended eye-opener for a non-Latino audience. On

Deadline, Díaz commented that ”literary fame is no fame at all,” and that he is writing for “nerds,”

which may in part explain why he has envisioned Oscar as a stigmatized individual. Díaz counts on

the reader having experienced some of the stigma that Oscar is met by. While Díaz may be trying to

tone down his own impact on the literary scene, he also stresses the purpose of his fiction: “Novels

[...] put you into lives of people that you normally would not care to be or people that you might not

even like. And therefore you exercise one of the true human vocations: compassion, and

compassion is one of the few things that contemporary societies don't ask their citizens to practice.

But art does” (Deadline). Human relationships may function in the ways described by Goffman, but

art, Díaz claims, is here to combat the cynical, apersonal system described by the sociologist.

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Goffman's thesis explains interpersonal relationships, but art has the potential to provoke an

epiphany within the reader, to show the humanity inherent in the dehumanized and stigmatized

body. Goffman claims that “we believe the person with a stigma is not quite human” (Goffman 15).

Díaz's fiction attempts to cure this problematic attitude by forcing the reader to experience the

world vicariously through Oscar. By situating the reader in Oscar's subjective position, Díaz's

intentions echoes those of standpoint theory (Thomson 24).

One of the narrative tools used by Díaz to bridge the gap between reader and Oscar is the

depiction of violence. At the very beginning of the novel the author introduces the reader to a major

concept in Dominican culture, fúku, “a curse or a doom of some kind” (Díaz, Oscar Wao 1). This

curse is embodied by the dictator Rafael Trujillo: “It was Trujillo; it was the fukú” (ibid. 4). The

Dominican dictator haunts every page of the novel even though he was assassinated in 1961.

Although Díaz was born seven years after the death of the dictator, he still felt the presence of

Trujillo's ghost. Díaz's father, a member of the Trujillato, had his children salute him every morning,

earning him the dubious title of “the little dictator.” While Trujillo's body might have been long

gone, his legacy endured.

According to Oscar Wao the dictator subscribed to a European notion of the ideal body. Díaz

describes him as a “portly, sadistic pig-eyed mulato who bleached his skin, wore platform shoes,

and had a fondness for Napoleon-era haberdashery” (Díaz, Oscar Wao 2). Trujillo approximates a

European look by bleaching his skin in order to create a stigma against the black populace of the

Dominican Republic, while simultaneously distancing himself from them. The dictator's racism

trickles down the social ladder: Yunior remarks that “people took their child's black complexion as

an ill omen” (Díaz, Oscar Wao 248). Trujillo succeeds in disqualifying the black inhabitants of the

Dominican Republic by cultivating a notion of white supremacy, justifying the violence against

predominantly black Haitians.

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Díaz conveys the abundant racism and poverty by showing the Dominican Republic as a

refuge of white sex tourists. In the summer, the island becomes “one big party for everybody but the

poor, the dark, the jobless, the sick, the Haitian, their children, the bateys, the kids that certain

Canadian, American, German and Italian tourists love to rape – yes, sir, nothing like a Santo

Domingo summer” (Díaz, Oscar Wao 272). There are many ways to be (socially) disabled in Santo

Domingo; sickness is likened to being Haitian or having a darker complexion, which explains

Trujillo's skin bleaching. The only remaining normates on Trujillo's island are the Western tourists,

who come to practice sexual deviance that would see them stigmatized in their own communities.

Because Trujillo has constructed a narrative around white supremacy, however, the tourists are free

to do as they please.

The Violence of the Immigrant Experience

Díaz illustrates the power of Trujillo, in life and in death, by having all of his principal characters

brutally beaten. Three generations of Cabrals have their bodies ruined because Oscar's grandfather

Abelard stands up to Trujillo, triggering the fukú curse. Trujillo imprisons Abelard, where his wife

is allowed to visit him. Her gaze reveals his broken form: “His eyes were blackened; his hands and

neck covered in bruises and his torn lip had swollen monstrously, was the color of the meat inside

your eye […] one of his testicles would be permanently shriveled from the blows” (Díaz, Oscar

Wao 241). The father of Soccoro, Abelard's wife, was also beaten to death by a member of the

police, reinforcing the sense of the Dominican Republic as a cursed place full of abused power.

Abelard's beating is the first of three described in detail by Díaz, and arguably the least brutal of

them all.

The violence against Oscar is softened by Díaz's use of postmodern allusions and the

passage remains profoundly un-bloody and unrealistic until the climax, where “Grod jumped down

on his head with both his boots” (ibid. 299). Díaz has consciously chosen to portray many of the

27


violent scenes as distinctly unrealistic: ”to get at the full essence someone like Trujillo and that kind

of US-backed dictatorships, you need to use extreme narratives and science fiction, fantasy and

horror are extreme narratives that many people are familiar enough with that they can be useful”

(Deadline). Díaz draws on the Latin American tradition of magical realism, infusing violent

passages with references to Oscar's everyday life which includes role-playing games and comic

book narratives. The result is a postmodern hybrid of descriptive passages, which shifts to the

language of medicine when summarizing the damage done to Oscar's mother, Belicia:

How she survived I'll never know. They beat her like she was a slave. Like she was a dog. Let me pass

over the actual violence and report instead on the damage inflicted: her clavicle, chicken-boned; her right

humerus, a triple fracture (she would never again have much strength in that arm); five ribs, broken; left

kidney, bruised; liver, bruised; right lung, collapsed; front teeth, blown out. About 167 points of damage

in total and it was only sheer accident that these motherfuckers didn't eggshell her cranium, though her

head did swell to elephant-man proportions. Was there time for a rape or two? I suspect there was, but we

shall never know because it's not something she talked about. All that can be said is that it was the end of

language, the end of hope. It was the sort of beating that breaks people, breaks them utterly. (Díaz, Oscar

Wao 147)

The description of Beli's injuries reads like a medical record. So brutal is the violence that the

narrator calls it “the end of language.” Díaz uses the universal nature of physical pain to elicit

sympathy from his audience, thus hoping to make his Dominican characters relatable. By

vicariously experiencing pain, readers are meant to emotionally connect with characters that may be

very different from themselves. According to Tobin Siebers the eyes of the audience are drawn to

the spectacle of human suffering. The injured body “absorbs the gaze of beholders, making it

difficult for them to tear their eyes away, despite the pain and violence displayed there” (Siebers

131). By objectively assessing the damage done to the characters' bodies, Díaz provokes the reader's

imagination into creating a mental image of the cursed Dominicans and their injuries, thereby

creating a sympathetic bond to the characters and their plight.

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The brutalization of three generations by Dominican government officials serves to illustrate

the difficulty of escaping one's ethnic roots and seamlessly integrate into another society. The

violence can also be understood as portraying the cheapness of life in an authoritarian regime:

“That's white people for you. They lose a cat and it's al all-points bulletin, but we Dominicans, we

lose a daughter and we might not even cancel our appointment at the salon” (Díaz, Oscar Wao 66).

The Dominican people has been traumatized to the point where loss of human life does not shock

them anymore. Juxtaposed with the Western notion of every life being sacred, Díaz's portrait of

Dominican life seems unforgiving.

Díaz remediating the immigrant experience via violence is possible because disability and

other minorities share the same fate of stigmatization, although they do not necessarily have

anything else in common. According to Thomson, otherness based on disability and race do not

create any sense of solidarity. In fact, within disability studies, wheelchair users and visually

impaired people will find little enough common ground: “Although categories such as ethnicity,

race, and gender are based on shared traits that result in community formation, disabled people

seldom consider themselves a group […] Only the shared experience of stigmatization creates

commonality” (Thomson 14-15). While the disabled person and the immigrant are not

interchangeable, they still are enough like each other to enable Díaz succesfully communicating the

sense of stigmatization to his readers by utilizing the bodies of his characters.

Belicia's Buxom Body

Díaz describes the injuries suffered by members of the Cabral family in order to create sympathy

with the Dominican's plight. In doing so, he draws upon the charity model, which invites the

audience to pity those who are perceived to be weaker or more unfortunate than the normate

audience themselves. The charity model, although considered outdated by the disability community,

attempts to create common ground in the experience of hardship. One character is especially

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important in this sense. Oscar's mother, Belicia Cabral, is presented as a liminal character, caught

between the Dominican Republic and America. Her father, Abelard, never went to the US, but Beli

did, and as such, she is a first-wave immigrant, not entirely integrated into American society. In

contrast to her, Oscar's obese body has literally absorbed American popular culture to the extent that

it has “suffused” the story (Deadline).

Beli is defined by her physical appearance: “Where before Beli had been a gangly ibis of a

girl, pretty in a typical sort of way, by summer's end she'd become un mujerón total, acquiring that

body of hers, that body that made her famous in Baní. […] like the older sister she had never met,

Beli was transformed almost overnight into an underage stunner” (Díaz, Oscar Wao 91). Díaz

especially emphasises her breasts: “After her face and her hair, her chest is what she is most proud

of” (ibid. 52) In the course of the novel, Beli loses her breasts to cancer, essentially stripping her

character of its one defining trait.

Her body, when healthy, is thoroughly Dominican, since Yunior describes the Dominican

Republic as a place defined by sexual exploits. Besides her breasts, Beli also possesses another

defining trait, the scar on her back: “The girl's burns were unbelievably savage. (One hundred and

ten points minimum.) A monsterglove of festering ruination extending from the back of her neck to

the base of her spine. A bomb crater, a world-scar like those of a hibakusha” (ibid. 257).

Symbolically, Belicia carries the weight of her Dominican past on her back. Díaz creates this effect

by his usage of the word “ruination”, since he also uses it to describe the chaos of Santo Domingo.

Díaz describes the city as full of “buses that charged past so overflowing with passengers that from

the outside they looked like they were making a rush delivery of spare limbs to some far-off war

and the general ruination of so many of the buildings as if Santo Domingo was the place that

crumbled crippled concrete shells came to die” (Díaz, Oscar Wao 273). The word ”ruination”

reveals a direct link between Beli's scar and the city of Santo Domingo. This makes it tempting to

30


view her as a liminal character, out of her element in the United States, her physical scar signifying

the emotional baggage of the diaspora even though her body is now situated in the US.

An autobiographical layer is added to the scar by the tale of its origins. Beli received the

wound in a fight in which she “got burned, horribly; the father, who was not her father, splashed a

pan of hot oil on her naked back” (Díaz, Oscar Wao 255) Díaz hints at his own troubled relationship

with his father in the Deadline interview, which is mirrored in Oscar's father being conspicuously

absent throughout the novel. Thus, Beli's scar serves multiple functions, carrying associations to

both the general diaspora of the Dominican people and the personal tragedy of the author's familial

relationships. Tobin Siebers has argued that “In every oppressive system of our day [...] the

oppressed identity is represented in some way as disabled, and although it is hard to understand, the

same process obtains when disability is the oppressed identity” (26). This supports my argument

that Díaz employs different injuries and abnormal body traits as a way of reaching out to his

audience in order to make them understand the horror of immigrant stigmatization through the lens

of extraordinary body traits which they might already have experiences with, such as Oscar's

obesity, race and unfashionable interests forming the basis of his oppression in the US.

Beli does what she can to distance herself from the Dominicans who are still on the island:

“If she'd owned a fur she would have worn it, anything to communicate the distance she'd traveled,

to emphasize how not like the rest of these dominicanos she was” (Díaz, Oscar Wao 272). Beli does

everything in her power to contrast her own body with the other Dominicans', not unlike Trujillo

himself, who appropriated a European look to create a gulf between his own “heavily powdered

face” (ibid. 222) and the downtrodden people he ruled.

As a first-generation immigrant, Beli functions as an obstacle in her daughter's quest

towards complete integration: “When she threw away my Smiths and Sisters of Mercy posters –

Aquí yo no quiero maricones – I bought replacements. When she threatened to tear up my new

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clothes, I started keeping them in my locker and at Karen's house. When she told me that I had to

quit my job at the Greek diner I explained to my boss that my mother was starting to lose it because

of her chemo” (Díaz, Oscar Wao 60). Beli objects to the symbolic Western presence of band

posters, as well as Lola working at a diner; things that might be of help in Lola's integration. Like

Beli in her youth, Lola longs to escape, but despite her struggles, the ties that bind the family

together are supernatural because of the Cabral fukú curse.

Díaz questions the desirability of the cultural integration desired by Lola: “Juan, the short-

sighted romantic whose girlfriends robbed him blind and who never mastered Spanish (though in

later years when he was living in Skokie, Illinois, he would yell at his Americanized grandchildren

in his guttural Spanish, and they laughed at him, thinking it Chinese” (Díaz, Oscar Wao 105). Díaz

obscures the point with humor, but underneath it remains the fact that American culture is

overriding immigrant heritage. Juan's descendants not being bilingual signifies a loss of racialized

identity, and the movement towards a sanitized society, completely unmarked by the different

people that have made America their home, seems inevitable. Thus, Díaz critizises the normalizing

aspect of the American melting pot.

While cultural traits, like skin color or language, may function as sources of stigmatization

(such as the word ”nigger”, which the author was criticized for using in Oscar Wao), Díaz seems

genuinely saddened by the notion that America may become completely uniform if all cultural traits

are allowed to disappear. In the Deadline interview, he underlines the ambiguous attitude towards

immigration in the United States: “If anything, the Americans don't fear immigrants forming

communities. In fact, Americans like that [...] If the communities are being isolated and

discriminated against and being marginalized, that's a ghetto. But if the communities are there to

support people, to help people and to be a launching pad to the larger society, that's not bad!”

(Deadline). Although he is a proponent of American multiculturalism, Díaz does not offer any

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solution to the problem of homogenization, choosing instead to explore its complexities through his

writing. Much like the diversity of human bodies, the cultural diversity of a country of immigrants

has many strengths that society should not be quick to dismiss.

The Promised Land

When Díaz's characters arrive in the United States, their otherness is instantly evident. The process

of integration for immigrants is not only covered in Oscar Wao, but in Díaz's two short story

collections as well. In many of the individual short stories, the plot revolves around a father leaving

for the US to attain citizenship, which would in turn allow the rest of his family to make the same

move. The greatest aspiration of Díaz's Dominicans is to move to the United States. Yunior's

grandfather tells him stories “about the good old days, when a man could still make a living from

his finca, when the United States wasn't something folks planned on” (Díaz, Drown 56). When the

absent father finally returns, the inevitable trip to America takes on divine proportions: “Rafa used

to think that he'd come in the night, like Jesus, that one morning we'd find him at our breakfast

table, unshaven and smiling. Too real to be believed. He'll be taller, Rafa predicted. North American

food makes people that way” (Díaz, Drown 69). In the children's fantasies, the diaspora comes to

symbolize a religious experience, a tangible salvation from the hard life of the Dominican Republic.

But in the short story “Drown”, the harsh reality is laid bare: “One teacher, whose family had two

grammar schools named after it, compared us to the shuttles. A few of you are going to make it.

Those are the orbiters. But the majority of you are just going to burn out. Going nowhere. He

dropped his hand onto his desk. I could already see myself losing altitude, fading, the earth spread

out beneath me, hard and bright” (Díaz, Drown 83-84). The teacher is the complete opposite of the

immigrant children, belonging to a family with a famous name and thus belonging to the hegemony.

In frightening the students, he attempts to keep racialized power structure in place, but the teacher

also seems to be right. The majority of Díaz's characters are poor, although a few, as the teacher

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prophesied, ”make it”. To these characters, the American dream is deflated, since the immigrant

children are met by invisible walls and glass ceilings at every turn, their foreignness often causing

them to be socially disabled. The juxtaposition with the privileged white normate becomes clear in

the short story “Edison, New Jersey”: “Most of our customers have names like this, court case

names: Wooley, Maynard, Gass, Binder, but the people from my town, our names, you see on

convicts or coupled together on boxing cards” (Díaz, Drown 101). The names illustrate the

institutional racism encountered by the immigrants. Díaz's characters are weighed down by their

otherness, stuck at the bottom of the social hierarchy. As Andrea Levine puts it, the Latino

characters are tired of “the numbing repeatability of this narrative – there are no surprises left in the

kind of racialized and gendered power that this affluent white man wields, both over his Latina

female employee and over the narrator” (155). When Díaz uses the names Yunior and Rafa in many

of his short stories, he underlines the predictability of the immigrant's fate.

In the final story of This Is How You Lose Her, “The Cheater's Guide to Love,” Yunior has

managed to become a professor, representing one of the few that ”made it,” thus moving closer to

the idealized figure of the normate. However, the short story chronicles the physical deterioration of

his body as well as the social deterioration which sees him devolve from a position of prestige to

the victim of racism, once again stressing the inevitability of having an othered body. Yunior's initial

success as a college professor is juxtaposed with the never-fading mark of his ethnicity: “Two

seconds later, security approaches you and asks for ID. The next day a whitekid on a bike throws a

can of Diet Coke at you” (Díaz, Lose Her 191). Applying the social model to Yunior's case reveals

race as a manifestation of disability. Unable to accomodate his bodily difference, society becomes

hostile towards him. Having had enough, Yunior turns on his own stigmatized race in desperation:

“Only a bitch of color comes to Harvard to get pregnant. White women don't do that. Asian women

don't do that. Only fucking black and Latina women. Why go to all the trouble to get into Harvard

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just to get knocked up? You could have stayed on the block and done that shit” (Díaz, Lose Her

198). Racialized self-loathing is echoed by Beli Oscar Wao: “If I had to put it to words I'd say what

she wanted, more than anything, was what she'd always wanted throughout her Lost Childhood: to

escape. From what was easy to enumerate: […] the horrible scars from that time, her own despised

black skin” (Díaz, Oscar Wao 79-80).

The United States, where Beli eventually ends up, becomes the symbol of all her hopes. Her

deepest desires are corporeal in nature, namely being in the possession of ”a woman's body” (ibid.

79), straightening her hair and escaping her own “despised black skin” (80). Beli's despair is caused

by her otherness, and her desires are based on erasing the defining traits of race and bodily

configuration. Her wish of becoming normate are echoed in Díaz's short story “Nilda” from This is

How You Lose Her: ”None of us wanted to be niggers. Not for nothing.” (39) In Drown, self-

loathing is also present: “Tell her that you love her hair, that you love her skin, her lips, because, in

truth, you love them more than you love your own” (Díaz, Drown 115). Racialized stigmatization is

a constant in Díaz's fiction, to the point where his characters accept the stigma placed upon their

race by the normate hegemony. His characters object to their bodies' otherness, wishing that they

could erase all bodily specifics and attain the normate archetype. They all wish to move closer to

the normate ideal, and the only way to do so is to strip one's personality of all defining traits.

Oscar is different than the other characters because he does not subscribe to the same

negative view of marked bodies, as when he ponders his girlfriend's features: “the slight declensions

in her appearances only seemed to add to her luster” (Díaz, Oscar Wao 287). Ybon's body, marked

by age, only compels Oscar, just as his extraordinary bodies compel the audience. Like Junot Díaz,

Oscar prefers heterogeneity to normativity.

Díaz's fiction communicates an ambiguous America to the reader. It is one in which

stigmatization runs rampant and society itself is superficial, since the human body can either

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facilitate opportunities, such as when Belí escapes her lower-class life because of her body's sexual

prowess, or be the reason an individual is cast out, as in the case of Oscar's obesity and stigmatized

interests. Luck becomes central, because a multitude of factors decide whether an individual will be

stigmatized and thus discriminated against, which will impact his or her chances of attaining

success in American society. In an interview Díaz gave to Callaloo, a journal focused on African

American and African diaspora writings, he stated: “I think if you're poor in the United States,

chances are you're going to be poor for a very long time. […] You could accidentally end up, by

freak accident of geography, being bused into a school which has more money than the school you

would have gone to if you had lived two blocks away” (Céspedes 893). While America potentially

provides sanctuary for immigrants, it can also be a living hell, as it is for the Cabral family, who are

pursued by the fukú curse even after they leave the Dominican Republic. Like most other

immigrants, their background leaves them socially immobile.

Díaz's descriptions of corporeal violence acts as a relatable metaphor for the immigrant

experience, one which is designed to work because the body is such a vital part of the human

condition.

Yiyun Li: Mao's Playthings

There is a distinct historical parallel to draw between Yiyun Li and Ha Jin's China and the

Dominican Republic: Both have had dictators within a human lifetime. Like Junot Díaz, Yiyun Li

conjures up the shadow of her country's former leader, and like Díaz's Trujillo, Li's Mao is present

on every page of Yiyun Li's book. The authors' attitudes differ, however; Díaz portrays Trujillo in a

decidedly unflattering light, Yunior's loathing visible to the reader at every mention of the deceased

tyrant. Li is more ambiguous, showing the people's loyalty towards the Chairman: “Let the

Americans drop the atomic bombs on our heads. We have five hundred million people in our nation.

Even if half of us are killed, we still have two hundred and fifty million, and these two hundred and

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fifty million would produce another two hundred and fifty million in no time” (Li 50). This quote,

from the short story “Immortality”, showcases the notion of Mao as the head of the

anthropomorphic People's Republic, with the individual cells composed of expendable citizens.

Díaz also stressed the cheapness of life in his chronicles of Dominican life, but the ruthlessness of

both Chinese and the Dominican dictatorships clashes violently with the Western focus on the

individual's pursuit of happiness as opposed to living and working for the sake of someone else. The

political indoctrination of the Chinese workers obscures the fact that the toils of the many usually

only better the lives of those at the top of the social pyramid. In the above quote, Yiyun Li echoes a

passage from the Bible, in which Jesus exorcises spirits from the body of a possessed man: “My

name is Legion: for we are many” (Mark, 5:9). The quote adds to Li's indictment of Mao by

imbuing the People's Republic of China, and subsequently its leader, with demonic connotation..

“Immortality” functions as a crash course in Chinese history, introducing the audience to

Chinese culture and history. Li assumes that her readers do not know much of her native China.

Junot Díaz uses the same technique in Oscar Wao, playing with the supposed ignorance of his

readers: “You didn't know we were occupied twice in the twentieth century? Don't worry, when you

have kids they won't know the US occupied Iraq either” (Díaz, Oscar Wao 19). The authors know

that their stories need to be told, because nobody else will do it for them. Thus, reading immigrant

fiction becomes an act of witnessing the hardships of othered bodies. Through the use of standpoint

writing, the writers broaden the horizon of their readership.

In Li's fiction, the author stresses the importance of tradition. The plot of “Immortality”

focuses on a young man who comes from a village known for its Great Papas, eunuchs who

historically served the ruler-families of China. The protagonist shows a great physical likeness to

Mao, which makes him valuable, since the leaders of China believe its citizens would not be able to

function properly in the case of his death: “He is the man whose story we do not want to end, and as

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far as we can see, there will be no end to his story” (Li 67). Mao is seen by the populace as

embodying China itself, and, like in Oscar Wao, the author conjures a sense of the past in the

present, the dictator permeating all of modern Chinese history.

The markedness of the Great Papas in “Immortality” invites a reading of their bodies. The

eunuchs are unsullied by “the low and dirty desires of men” (Li 45), because they “gave up their

maleness so that our names would not vanish in history” (ibid. 44). The narrator uses the communal

“we” to describe themselves, hinting at the Communist sense of society's importance at the

individual's expense. Furthermore, the Great Papas having their sexual organs removed illustrates a

wish for bodies to be as generic as possible. Like disability, the male sex drive is here understood as

a corrupting influence. In Yiyun Li's book, the threat is that the Chinese aristocrats, and in turn all

of society, will deteriorate if it comes into contact with male sexuality. The ideal body in Chinese

culture is not entirely like Thomson's normate, but rather a totally blank, sanitized human body,

unmarked by sexuality. In the age of Mao, the Great Papas are replaced by the Chairman's

doppelgängers, but their similar function becomes obvious when the protagonist “cleans himself by

his mother's tomb” (Li 66). In the introduction of his Disability Aesthetics, Tobin Siebers connects

bodily representations with politics: “Since aesthetic feelings of pleasure and disgust are difficult to

separate from political feelings of acceptance and rejection, what do objects representing disability

tell us about the ideals of political community underlying works of art?” (2). The “cleaned” body is

now without the ability to either disgust or please the human eye. It just is. The same may be said of

the untold masses of Chinese people ready to give their lives for Mao. Li does not describe them,

they just exist. Unlike the bodies of Oscar, Yunior, Belí and Lola, they do not possess any detailed

attributes, and they lose all sense of individuality and agency. Lacking the empathy of Díaz's fiction,

the Chinese people become a mere number to the reader, seemingly without any individual

aspirations and traits. Li communicates that life in Mao's regime is without pleasure and pain, ups

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and downs, the citizens caught in limbo. The people live only to serve Mao, and by extension,

China.

The Chinese people may live only for Mao, but the dictator's enforcers are an ever-present

threat to deviants. In “Persimmons,” Li demonstrates how harshly the government officials treat

citizens at any perceived slight as a judge throws a young boy into a water reservoir: “They cried,

begged, but the judges all said it would teach the little bastard a lesson. The boys sent the fastest

one among them to run for help. Lao Da's son was found later that night, his eyelids, lips, fingers,

toes, and penis all eaten bad shapes by the feasting fish” (Li 184). Like Oscar, Beli and Abelard,

Chinese bodies are also treated as being entirely disposable by the government's representatives. As

in “Immortality”, Lao Da's son is stripped of individual markers, but not in the same clean fashion.

The author intends to disgust the reader by describing the cruel treatment of a small boy, but also at

the wounds his body sustains. Yiyun Li invites us to envision the mutilated body of a little boy, and

subsequently hopes to summon in the audience feelings of sadness and resentment through the

workings of the charity model. Siebers claims this is a valid strategy: “The human body is both the

subject and object of aesthetic production: the body creates other bodies prized for their ability to

change the emotions of their maker and endowed with a semblance of vitality usually ascribed only

to human beings” (Siebers 1).

Yiyun Li obviously wants to provoke the audience and succesfully does so, mainly because

the malignant and violent treatment of children is a universal taboo. Children, whether they are

from the United States or China, are comparatively helpless against an adult male body, so pitting

the Maoist representative against a little boy, who comes to represent the sufferings of all the

people, provokes a strong reaction. Like Preston Blair's “cute character” from the introduction, the

scene is meant to move the reader by speaking to us on a primal level, but in this case also

transfixing our gaze with the scene's violence. As in Díaz's description of Beli's beating, the

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audience is invited to surmise the injuries on display. Siebers claim that hurt bodies “fascinate and

absorb our attention rather than terrifying us. They compel us, like doubting Thomas, to probe the

miracle in the details, to put a finger in the wound” (125). By focusing on the human cost of

totalitarian government, Yiyun Li conjures up a strong anti-Maoist argument in a few lines of prose,

just as Junot Díaz does when describing the unfair treatment his characters suffer at the hands of

Trujillo's enforcers.

Yiyun Li's idea of the American dream is comparable to Junot Díaz's in its divine lure of

escape: ”For me, the American dream meant that I could pick up writing and become a writer,

something I had never dared to dream before coming here. For my characters, it means freedom to

escape totalitarian control on many different levels—from parental supervision to the ideological

control of the Communist party” (”Conversation”). America features explicitly in a few of the short

stories in A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, but in the ones I have analyzed, the United States are

conspicuously absent, an unspoken alternative to the horrors of Mao's China. Like Díaz's characters,

whose move to the US seems inevitable to them, Li's teacher Sasha remains “ready to abandon the

students for America and any minute” (95). Although criticized in the West, the myth of America as

a land of freedom from prejudice still persists in oppressed regions.

Ha Jin: Stigma and Tradition

Like Yiyun Li, Ha Jin is a Chinese-American author in self-chosen exile. His move to the United

States in the mid-eighties was forced upon him by the totalitarian Chinese state: “I was fascinated

by their fiction: their literary subject matter was not confined to politics and social movements, as it

was in China, and the techniques they used – such as stream of consciousness and multiple narrative

points of view – were unheard of to me” (Qtd. in Johnson 80). Ha Jin's love of the American literary

giants makes him mix the literary tradition of his birthplace with the themes and styles of his

adopted home to produce the hybrid style that is immigrant literature. Like many of Yiyun Li's short

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stories, Waiting does not take place in the US, but rather in Communist China. However, Ha Jin

believes that even though a narrative takes place in a specific place, it can still be relevant to other,

geographically distant people: ”You have to start with a place and through that place – the

particularity – you can reach the universal. In other words, the universal resides in the particular”

(Qtd. in Johnson 77). The human body makes all tales of violence universal, but the violence in

Waiting is mostly emotional.

Two thirds of the book is an account olf the protagonist Lin Kong's attempts to divorce the

“small, withered” (Ha Jin 6) Shuyu, since Lin never really loved her. Furthermore, he believes he

has found true love in another woman, Manna Wu. After eighteen years, he succesfully divorces

Shuyu and marries Manna, only to regret his actions soon after. The woman he has pined for is no

longer interesting to him, and ironically, he suddenly enjoys spending time with his former family.

Lin Kong's tragic flaw is that he is unable to enjoy the moments of his current life, instead

longing for the past or an imagined future. Ha Jin often conveys his protagonist's regret: “Why was

he so passionless? Did his refusal mean he was reluctant to get embroiled with her?” (ibid. 70). Lin

Kong's self-doubt is a constant throughout the novel. He attempts to rationalize his emotions by

blaming symbols of tradition, such as arranged marriage and Shuyu's bound feet: “If only he hadn't

agreed to let his parents choose a bride for him. If only his wife were pretty and her feet had not

been bound. Or if only she and he had been a generation older, so that people in the city wouldn't

laugh at her small feet” (ibid. 49). The bound feet is a remnant of an older Chinese civilization, and

throughout the novel, people react to the sight of Shuyu's feet, often with ridicule or staring wonder.

Lin is sympathetic towards his wife, but objectifies her: “He hadn't thought she had her own ideas

and feelings” (ibid. 96). Lin Kong has disqualified his wife, partly on the basis of her bodily

configuration, but also because of her stigmatization: “He wanted a marriage based on love and a

wife whose appearance wouldn't embarrass him in the presence of others” (ibid. 77). Ha Jin

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portrays China as a country of endless gossip, where people are routinely judged on their

appearance: “This was the New China; who would look up to a young woman with bound feet?”

(ibid. 8). What was in earlier times meant as a blessing becomes a curse for Shuyu, at least in the

eyes of others. Thus her feet illustrate the dynamic nature of stigma, since at another point in time,

she would have been valued for this trait.

Shuyu never seems to have a problem with her feet herself: “Mother said it's my second

chance to marry good, 'cause my face ugly. You know, men are crazy about lotus feet in those days.

The smaller your feet are, the better looking you are to them” (ibid. 206), but her husband feels the

shame of having a wife who is perceived as inferor. According to Siebers, the social knocks

sustained by Lin Kong can hurt more than Shuyu's feet: “When disability is made visible as a

negative image, the suffering of the body really begins, because, while physical impairment and

injury may be painful, social injury is more painful for human beings” (Siebers 133). Tellingly of

Chinese gender relations, the wife functions as a source of status meant for furthering the patriarch's

own reputation rather than being a partner in an equal relationship. Since he cannot benefit from the

marraige, Lin Kong disqualifies Shuyu, stripping her of agency and dehumanizing her.

Shuyu's bound feet were supposed to outweigh her stigmatized unattractiveness, but due to

the changing times, they end up as a social and physical disability, one which is paid much attention

by others: “Shuyu liked the nurses. Yet however hard they begged her, she would not take off her

small shoes, of which they often sang praises” (Ha Jin 205). This curious craving to look upon

bodily otherness is also found in Junot Díaz's short story “Ysrael” from Drown, in which two boys,

Yunior and Rafa, are keen to have a look at the stigmatized trait of the eponymous Ysrael, satisfying

their curiosity and assuring them of their constrasting normality. Ysrael wears a mask because of his

scarred face: “Even on this side of Ocoa people had heard of him, how when he was a baby a pig

had eaten his face off, skinned it like an orange. He was something to talk about, a name that set the

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kids to screaming, worse than el Cuco or la Vieja Calusa” (Díaz, Drown 4). Ysrael's face is a horror

story known by all the people in the vicinity, and like Shuyu's bound feet, he is a source of mystery

and gossip. Because of their deviating bodies, Shuyu and Ysrael provide more interesting

conversation than an unmarked body. In “Ysrael,” curiosity leads to violence as Yunior and Rafa

wants to look at the othered body:

His left ear was a nub and you could see the thick veined slab of his tongue through a hole in his cheek.

He had no lips. His head was tipped back and his eyes had gone white and the cords were out on his neck.

He'd been an infant when the pig had come into the house. The damage looked old but I still jumped back

and said, Rafa, let's go! Rafa crouched and using only two of his fingers, turned Ysrael's head from side

to side. (Díaz, Drown 14)

Again, the emotionally neutral language of Díaz is juxtaposed with the unfair treatment of the

othered body. As in the case of his immigrant figures, Junot Díaz attempts to create sympathy for

the marginalized individuals of society.

Because of their respective stigma, Shuyu and Ysrael are both objectified by their

environment. In the eyes of others, they become vessels for their stigmatized traits rather than fully

formed individuals: “A disability functions only as visual difference that signals meanings.

Consequently, literary texts necessarily make disabled characters into freaks, stripped of

normalizing contexts and engulfed by a single stigmatic trait” (Thomson 10-11). In Shuyu's case it

is not, as Thomson suggests, the author who simplifies the notion of disability, but rather the on-

lookers who are eager to see what bound feet look like. In the process, they completely disregard

any potential emotional harm to Shuyu. Like Lin Kong, they strip her of her humanity, unable to

imagine such a person – an embodiment of one single attribute – having any wishes and thoughts of

her own. Thus, Shuyu's feet leads to her enfreakment, a visual spectacle to be enjoyed by everyone

else without considering any emotional harm done to her.

Communist China, like the US and the Dominican Republic, has its own set of taboos, with

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divorce being one source of stigma. When the indecisive Lin Kong one of his many changes of

heart, he automatically thinks of normalcy and what is appropriate: “Now it seemed clear that they

ought to stay together, unless she were willing to live as a spinster for good without looking for a

husband, which would have been inappropriate and abnormal. Everyone was supposed to marry;

even the retarded and the paralyzed were not exempted. Wasn't it a sacred human duty to produce

and raise children?” (Ha Jin 99). The physically disabled are also meant to reproduce, which

illustrates how roughly such a totalitarian regime treats its citizens. By claiming that everybody, for

good or worse, are equal, Ha Jin echoes Yiyun Li's description of the Chinese people as a single,

homogeneous mass rather than a collection of individuals.

In an interview published in Contemporary Literature, Ha Jin displays great contempt for

the Chinese government, which orders its citizens around at will: “The Communists wanted to

control people. Not just the body, but also your soul, your psyche, your sexual energy included; all

your energy was supposed to be channeled toward the cause, toward serving the cause of the

Revolution. The Party basically controlled every part of the individual's life” (Varsava 12-13). In

totalitarian China, the people have a duty to produce children, creating a sense of the Party

physically controlling the bodies under its rule by means of regulations and stigmatization. In a

country which treats its inhabitants as disposable tools for perpetuating the hegemony of the

government, it comes as little surprise that so many people want to try their luck in the United

States.

Due to the aforementioned Communist notion of equality, bodily differences are papered

over and ignored at the governmental level, so that everybody may be treated exactly the same. On

the inter-personal level, however, the human body remains one of the most importants parameters of

quick judgment: “Seeing the husband and wife come out of the courthouse, some spectators

whispered that the couple indeed didn't match. The husband looked quite gentle, in no way like an

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evil, abusive man, whereas the wife was as thin as a chicken whose flesh, if cooked, couldn't fill a

plate. If they were so different, they might not be able to avoid conflicts” (Ha Jin 124). Ha Jin's

Chinese characters do not care about the inner lives of their compatriots, only about bodily

configuration. In this case, it leads to rumours of incompatibility on the basis of appearance.

Waiting suggests that stigmatization is the universal experience of human existence. At a

crucial point in Waiting, Manna Wu is raped by the hyper-masculine Geng Yang, which prompts

judgment from her fellow citizens: “From then on, whenever the little woman saw Manna she

would call her 'Self-delivery' or shout, 'Poked by a man!' The curses often made Manna feel as

though she had lost a limb or a vital organ and become handicapped” (Ha Jin 195-196). Ha Jin uses

physical disability as a metaphor to communicate how the enfreaked outcast rape victim feels.

Disability is not necessarily of the body, but found in the relationship between bodies. The fact that

Manna Wu might be left out of decisions, overlooked when it comes to promotions and gossiped

about all show that a socially disabled person is not wholly part of the society in which she dwells.

Whether the human body is situated in America, China or the Dominican Republic, the rules of

human existence remain the same; the dynamics of human oppression, crude categorizing and

discrimination cannot easily be escaped.

Summary

The books examined in this chapter all convey a desire to escape autocratic societies. Immigrant

authors adopt bodily injury as a narrative tool which they use to demonstrate the suffering of their

native countries to geographically removed audiences. The Dominican Republic and China have

both experienced the tyranny of dictatorship within a human lifespan, where “the individual is

crushed under the weight of political structures” (Varsava 3). The historical background of these

countries has prompted exiled writers to contribute their witness accounts and comment on the

difference between the place of their birth and their adopted home.

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Stigmatization appears in both autocratic and democratic societies, and escaping to America

from China or the Dominican Republic does not guarantee freedom from oppression. Ha Jin argues

that autocratic societies, such as “modern China place little enough importance on the development

of the individual, on the vouchsafing of individual liberties” (Varsava 3), but as Díaz's fiction

illustrates, moving to America may merely mean experiencing other sorts of oppression. While

autocratic societies are forces of extreme homogeneity, the democratic United States are different,

but not entirely for the better. While citizen in China and the Dominican Republic are crushed under

the heel of a cruel dictator, new Americans have to deal with the tyranny of perceived normalcy.

Racialized bodies deviate from the normate construction, and the immigrants' othered form

becomes a stigmatized prison that they cannot possibly escape. Díaz has noted that the difference

between the Dominican Republic of the Trujillo-era and the contemporary United States may not be

that big: “The truth is that if Trujillo was alive and well, he would feel extremely comfortable in the

United States. I mean, for God’s sake, the war in Iraq [would be] just perfect: He loved a civic

society that misunderstood what it was and he loved an exceptionally violent governing elite” (Jay).

The ostensibly democratic society of the United States has its own established power relations that

perpetuate the oppression on the basis of deviation from normalcy.

Siebers' claim that “Disability is the trope by which the assumed inferiority of these other

minority identity achieved expression” (24) is used by writers like Díaz to compare the universal

experience of physical pain with different kinds of pain that may be outside the sphere of the

reader's experience, such as the awkwardness and anguish of the diaspora in general, and the pariah

Oscar in particular. The writers I have covered in this chapter use standpoint theory to create a

counter-narrative in the hopes that they can elicit compassion from the reader. In the process, the

authors hope to show audiences that normalcy is an illusion, thereby humanizing those that have

been disqualified on the basis of their otherness.

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Although cultures vary greatly, the human body remains a powerful, universal tool, useful

for communicating across these cultural divides. The cheapness of life experienced by the

immigrants unite Chinese and Dominican immigrants in spite of their bodily differences. By

graphically portraying the violence endemic to authoritarian rule, the immigrant authors hope to

challenge the Western truism that every life is valuable by showing that not everyone enjoys such a

blessed existence. Díaz, Yiyun Li and Ha Jin all successfully utilize the human body as a metaphor

for the plight of the immigrant, which according to Junot Díaz has the power to create empathy with

characters “we might not even like” (Deadline) across cultural divides and geographical borders.

Thus, the authors overcome stigma-induced barriers based on gender, race and class by using the

human body as a basis for communication.

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Chapter II: The Superhuman Body

Disability lends a distinctive idiosyncrasy to any character that differentiates the character from the anonymous background of the 'norm.' (Mitchell & Snyder 222).

Disability marks a character as 'unlike' the rest of a fiction's cast, and once singled out, the character becomes a case of special interest who retains originality to the detriment of all other characteristics. (Mitchell & Snyder 228)

300: Disqualification in Ancient Greece

Even 'normal' bodies signify moral traits as well as the traits ascribed to disabled characters. Beautiful (and noble, gentle, or bourgeois) characters should be morally virtuous; cripped or deformed people are either worthy of pity or are villains motivated by bitterness or envy. (Bending 45)

In Zack Snyder's film 300 (2007), adapted from the graphic novel by Frank Miller (1998), bodily

hierarchies and human disqualification play a pivotal role in the plot. The Spartans, threatened by

the Persian warlord Xerxes' conquest, make a stand for their own survival, and by extension, the

democratic foundations of the Western world. The protagonist Leonidas tells the villainous Xerxes,

“The world will know that free men stood against a tyrant” (300), so that both the antagonist and

the audience know the stakes. The plot is based on a the historical battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC,

but the events have been modified to fit into the standards of mainstream fiction. It should be noted

that I am not distinguishing between the film and Frank Miller's graphic novel on which the film is

based, because the latter, for better or for worse, is very loyal towards its source material in both

plot and representation of characters. Additionally, Miller served as an executive producer during

the production of the film, so his artistic vision must have been fulfilled.

The title refers to the three hundred Spartan warriors who set out to halt Xerxes' advance. In

either medium, the Spartans' physiques are reminiscent of ancient Greek statues. According to the

film, their battle-formation, the phalanx, requires their homogeniety. Because of this, they cannot

include the deformed Ephialtes, who only wants to patriotically fight for his city-state.

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Figure 4: Leonidas (center) and his homogeneous warriors.

En route to Thermopylae, Leonidas comes upon the physically impaired Ephialtes. Initially

Leonidas, and by extension the audience, are asked to pity Ephialtes, which echoes Lennard J.

Davis' charity model; Ephialtes' disability is supposed to make the supposedly normate viewers

guilty about their superiority. After Leonidas rejects him, Ephialtes' deceptive nature becomes

apparent, and with it, the simplistic attitude towards people with disabilities that the filmmakers has

imbued the film with; according to the logic of the film, Ephialtes is of unsound body and therefore

also of unsound morality. Ephialtes' life was saved by his parents, who, despite the mores of Miller's

fictional Sparta, decided not to euthanize him at birth. Lacking doctors, the Spartan version of the

medical model is to remove illness and deformity from society by killing deviating infants.

However, scholars have pointed out that not only did the Greeks not practice infanticide, but in fact

“disability was often prized in classical Greece, particularly because so many people with

disabilities received their impairments in war or artisan activities, gaining marks of honor in a

warrior culture that also valued the aesthetic” (Bending 40). Instead of representing Spartan society

correctly, Miller depicts the Greeks as having zero tolerance for anomalous bodies because it suits

his construction of an ableist utopia.

Leonidas also expresses an ableist attitude in his treatment of Ephialtes, although, in the

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context of the film, it seems reasonable not to compromise their battle formation by including

Ephialtes. However, the Spartans' inability to accommodate Ephialtes in their society, if not their

army, exemplifies Tobin Siebers' notion of human disqualification. Ephialtes' admittance that he

should have been euthanized also shows that he subscribes to the Spartan cultural mores of

disqualification. Stigmatized by the Spartans, Ephialtes betrays them to Xerxes for material and

sexual gain, as well as a chance for inclusion: “Yes! I want it all! Wealth! Women! And one more

thing, I want a uniform” (300). Ephialtes' wish for a uniform is symptomatic of the need to belong.

Wearing a uniform, he hopes to be indistinguishable from and equal to the other Persians, thus

achieving normate status in his adopted society.

Xerxes' army actually seems more inclusive, but due to the Persian warlord's portrayal as an

effeminate, fetishistic individual of abnormal height, the audience is meant to be disgusted by him

and his minions. Furthermore, his dictatorial methods mirror those of Mao and Trujillo in that he

readily sacrifices huge numbers of soldiers to submit the Spartans. The audience is not meant to feel

any sympathy for the hundreds of Persians who perish, but when the young Spartan Astinos is

beheaded during a battle, Zack Snyder uses slow-motion to reinforce the tragedy of the young man's

death. Although Snyder presents the death dramatically because the narrator is Spartan, Astinos'

death also implies that only ideal bodies are worth grieving.

Ephialtes is not the only villain whose degeneracy is betrayed to the audience by his

physical form. The Persians are pictured as the exact opposite of the Spartans, an unruly mob of

heterogeneous bodies. While the Persian warriors are not physically disabled, they are cowardly

when facing the superior Spartans, and Xerxes' camp is meant to affront the audience with its

deform bodies and sexual degeneracy; when Ephialtes enters Xerxes' premises, the camera adopts

the point of view of his gaze to reveal naked bodies, an armless, androgynous body, and two kissing

girls, one of whom has a skin disease. The filmmakers thus juxtapose the healthy asceticism of the

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Spartans with the sexual hedonism and general immorality of the Persians, which manifests itself in

disease and dismemberment.

Because of its Bakthinesque qualities, the microcosm of Xerxes' tent actually seems more

like a utopian society than Sparta itself. The Persians seemingly do not reject anyone on the basis of

body configuration. Xerxes' camp is a refuge for the enfreaked body and Bakthin's carnivalesque

figure, who represents “the right to be 'other' in this world, the right not to make common cause

with any single one of the existing categories that life makes available; none of these categories

quite suits them, they seethe underside and falseness of every situation” (Qtd in Thomson 38).

Xerxes' tent embraces diversity and offers refuge from Greek stigmatization, becoming what

Foucault has called a heterotopia of deviation, where “those in which individuals whose behavior is

deviant in relation to the required norm are placed” (Foucault 25). Because the filmmakers position

Xerxes as the antagonist, the audience is meant to automatically root for the Spartans, but

examination of Greek attitudes towards otherness reveals issues that mirror those found in

American society. Thus, Miller and the Spartans legitimize marginalization while ostensibly

protecting American values.

Figure 5: Ephialtes and denizens of Xerxes' tent. From left: Ephialtes, anthropomorphic goat; androgynous amputee;

effeminate visage of Xerxes.

Through the camera's lens, Ephialtes' gaze also reveals an anthropomorphic goat, which invites the

audience to understand the narrative in light of standpoint theory. Because this narrative suddenly

includes mythical beasts, any illusions that this story might be historically accurate are instantly

dispelled. Dilios, the narrator, is the sole survivor of the Spartan army, and the plot is obviously

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colored by his opinions. However, even if the narrator does exacerbate the story, the distrust of

people with disabilities and the enfreakment of the Persians are still valid points of criticism, if not

more so, in light of this. Junot Díaz claims that “representation is not approbation,” (Deadline) but

in the case of 300 there is very little to suggest ambiguity in relation to the film's content. If “the

superhero tale serves as an allegory to modern life and provides an escape for readers” (Bucher &

Manning 68), it is, in this case, an escape to an exclusionary world where deviating bodies are not

tolerated, but distrusted and marginalized.

The Spartan-Persian relationship in 300 seems a simplified allegory for the relationship

between the United States and the Arab world, especially in light of the film premiering a few years

after 9/11. Leonidas has to request permission to go to war from the ephors, who are ”priests to the

old gods” (300). In his voice-over, the narrator Dilios calls them “Inbred swine. More creature than

man,” (ibid.) and “Diseased old mystics. Worthless remnants of a time before Sparta's ascent from

darkness” (ibid.). In the allegory of 300, the ephors take the place of modern-day politicians who

have to sanction any military intervention. In the tradition of the American cowboy hero, the

Spartan leader Leonidas circumvents the lawmakers, not wanting to be emasculated by the Athenian

“boylovers and philosophers,” (300) who have already gone to war.

Frank Miller has stated on his website that he believes the United States to be “at war

against a ruthless enemy” (Miller). In the same post, he expresses a strong admiration for the

military and a disdain for the Occupy movement, which he deems “pack of louts, thieves, and

rapists, an unruly mob, fed by Woodstock-era nostalgia and putrid false righteousness” (ibid.). The

right-wing sentiment of 300 seems clear, with Sparta acting as a stand-in for America, and Ephialtes

providing a tangible picture of otherness. By excluding him, the rest of the Spartans define who

they are: “Stigmatization not only reflects the tastes and opinions of the dominant group, it

reinforces that group's idealized self-description as neutral, normal, legitimate, and identifiable by

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denigrating the characteristics of less powerful groups or those considered alien” (Thomson 31). In

Miller's fascist fantasy, people with disabilities are to be briefly pitied, but otherwise only function

to establish the desirability of certain traits, thus perpetuating the tyranny of normalcy and

enfreaking bodily and racial otherness. Upon release, the film was attacked for perceived racism,

but its ableist tendencies, illustrated by having physically impaired characters appear only in

antagonistic functions, should also be pointed out. Representing otherness as alien and dangerous

makes the democratic sentiment of Miller's Spartans seem ironic, since every deviation is punished

by total exclusion from Spartan society. Miller and Snyder present Sparta as a manifestation of John

Winthrop's city upon a hill, but it is a utopian vision which allows for no human deviance.

In the narrative of 300, the filmmakers and Miller create antipathy almost exclusively by

appealing to the audience's sense of disgust. By representing the characters of Ephialtes, the

Persians and the ephors ugly, deform and cripple, the storytellers hope to influence the opinion of

the audience in favor of the Spartans. The intention is two-fold. In the case of Ephialtes and the

Ephors, the stigmatized trait of ugliness is meant to transgress the aesthetic sensibilities of the

audience, undermining their humanity and justifying the actions of the perfect Spartans. In the case

of the Persians, their sexual deviance and enfreaked bodies legitimize the violent deaths bestowed

upon them by Leonidas' warriors.

Whether Frank Miller and Zack Snyder succeed in manipulating the audience is open to

discussion, but the film's box office success may indicate so, even if many critics chastised the film.

If it is a viable strategy to repulse audiences by addressing their aesthethic sensibilities, the real-life

consequences are dire for people with impairments. The strategy of appealing to the audience's

sense of what is physically revolting and attractive presumes the normalcy of its audience. Without

it, the narrative logic of condemning human irregularity fails. According to author Rick Moody,

Miller's vision exemplifies the attitude of Hollywood in general: “American movies, in the main,

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often agree with Frank Miller, that endless war against a ruthless enemy is good, and military

service is good, that killing makes you a man, that capitalism must prevail” (Moody). 300 provides

extreme examples of American ableism, but other films also use disability to further their narrative

agendas.

The Able-Bodied Hero: Embodying American Exceptionalism

Disabled literary characters usually remain on the margins of fiction as uncomplicated figures or exotic aliens whose bodily configurations operate as spectacles, eliciting responses from other characters or producing rhetorical effects that depend on disability's cultural resonance. Indeed, main characters almost never have physical disabilities. (Thomson 9)

Protagonists are almost always defined as having normal bodies, the default setting of physicality in novels. When characters have disabilities, the novel is usually exclusively about those qualities. Yet the disabled character is never of importance himself or herself. Rather, the character is placed in the narrative 'for' the nondisabled characters – to help them develop sympathy, empathy, or as a counterbalance to some issue in the life of the 'normal' character. (Bending 45)

I claimed earlier that Leonidas was a continuation of the cowboy hero. Frank Miller has also

authored a series of noir graphic novels called Sin City (1991-2000), which, much like 300 has been

made into a succesful film. Sin City is a stylized universe of tough men and femmes fatales, which

draws upon the hard-boiled tradition of American culture. In The Myth of the American Superhero

(2002), John Shelton Lawrence and Robert Jewett argue that both the cowboy and hard-boiled

archetypes can be understood by their idea of the American monomyth, which builds upon but

differs from Joseph Campbell's influential notion of the classical monomyth from The Hero With a

Thousand Faces (1949). The American monomyth is defined as follows: ”A community in a

harmonious paradise is threatened by evil; normal institutions fail to contend with this threat; a

selfless superhero emerges to renounce temptations and carry out the redemptive task; aided by fate,

his decisive victory restores the community to its paradisiacal condition; the superhero then recedes

into obscurity” (6). These myths are set apart by their notions of inclusion and exile. In Campbell's

classical monomyth, “the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to

bestow boons on his fellow man” (Campbell 30), whereas Jewett and Lawrence's hero “recedes into

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obscurity,” having helped making the community a better place. This holds true for modern

superhero films such as Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises (2012) and Zack Snyder's Man

of Steel (2013), which pictures Batman and Superman respectively as orphaned loners who

reluctantly chooses to save their communities. Yet the American monomyth poses a democratic

problem, since the superhero's extralegal intervention has not been sanctioned by any authority. A

persistent theme in the Batman universe is the tension between the superhero and law enforcers,

who think Batman's vigilantism unethical or unnecessary. Nevertheless, the superhero's intervention

invariably saves his community, redeeming his choice of method.

The Dark Knight (2008) featured Batman's use of Big Brother-inspired surveillance

technology as a major theme which threatened the hero's democratic sentiment, but the potentially

tyrannical nature of the superhero narrative is not only found in the themes of the narrative, but also

in the representation of the heroes themselves. In modern superhero narratives, heroes are

represented as physically normative figures. Like 300's Leonidas, Bruce Wayne (Batman) and Kal-

El (Superman) are male, white, muscular and physically attractive. In the very first Batman comic,

Bruce Wayne is portrayed as a mentally, physically and financially privileged man. Lennard J.

Davis argues that audiences prefer normative characters as protagonists: “the very structures on

which the novel rests tend to be normative, ideologically emphasizing the universal quality of the

central character whose normativity encourges us to identify with him or her” (Reader 9). While

Davis bases his research on novels, I would argue that the same rules apply to most modern

narratives, including film.

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Figure 6: Bruce Wayne's superiority is stressed from the very first issue (Kane 3).

Although superheroes, as the term implies, are generally stronger or tougher than the average man,

storytellers know that audiences cannot emotionally connect with invincible characters. The

audience needs to feel a palpable sense of danger on behalf of the superhero, especially during

action sequences. Thus, the superheroes are always equipped with a modern Achilles' heel. Batman

has a shattered psyche, having witnessed his parents' murder as a boy. Kal-El's weakness is

traditionally kryptonite, though in Man of Steel he, like Bruce Wayne, also has a troubled mind,

stigmatized by his peers for his powers. Having locked himself in a closet, his classmates talk

amongst themselves:

CLASSMATE 1: “What's wrong with him anyway?”

CLASMATE 2: “He's such a freak.”

These details or wounds mark the body as different, one whose story may interest the audience.

While the heroes' mental scars supposedly create psychological depth usually not associated with

comic book narratives, they also establish the films as what has been called overcoming narratives.

Overcoming narratives use disability as a narrative device, which helps create a compelling story

arc of overcoming a stigmatized trait in order to become a better person, what Alison Hartnett terms

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a “supercrip”: ”When they are not inextricably linked with the dark side, disabled characters are

often portrayed as remarkable achievers, 'supercrips' who, against all odds, triumph over the tragedy

of their condition” (22). Oscar Pistorius, before the shooting incident in which his girlfriend was

killed, functioned as a real-world example of the supercrip archetype. Pistorius excelled at the 2012

Olympics, competing with able-bodied athletes and garnering much media attention. The

overcoming narrative portrays the vertical movement from disabled other to supercrip, ready to

enter society.

In Man of Steel and the Batman trilogy, the depictions of the superheroes' respective mental

disorders are not persuasive. Portraying the heroes as having psychological problems merely enable

the filmmakers to draw upon the powerful emotions of the overcoming narrative. Diminishing the

importance of mental illness in this manner spells trouble for the many people who already do or

one day will experience mental disorder themselves: “Nikolas Rose maintains that depression will

become the number one disability in the USA and the UK within the next ten years” (Reader 182).

The problem with the superhero as role model is that all real human beings will fall short in

comparison. While filmmakers simply draw upon the connotations of disability to deepen their

characters, real human beings cannot simply choose to ignore or overcome mental disorders as the

heroes seemingly can.

Figure 7: Healthy, heterogeneous heroes. From left to right: Batman Begins (2005), Man of Steel (2013), Thor (2011),

Captain America (2011).

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The body of the superhero, unlike his psyche, is conspicuously unmarked. Tobin Siebers argues that

the “detail serves in the history of aesthetics not merely as a negativity or sign of decadence but as a

diagnostic tool useful to discriminate between the nondisabled and disabled body. […] Healthy

bodies in art do not have details. They are unmarked” (Siebers 125). The psychological problems of

the superhero does not extend to the body, since this might transgress against the aesthetic leanings

of the audience, undermining the storyteller's attempt to create a sympathetic hero. The superhero,

then, mixes the desirable traits of the normate, such as being able-bodied, with the narrative power

of the overcoming narrative in order to maximize appeal and relatability to the audience. Thus, the

modern superhero is a liminal character, part normate, part deviant. By portraying him in this way,

superhero narratives build upon the frontier myth, in which the hero is part of both society and the

wilderness: “the hunter […] may not merge his identity with the wilderness so far that he is truly of

it” (Slotkin 552). If the superhero narrative is an updated version of the wilderness myth, the unruly,

deviant body takes the place of the wilderness. In order to continually protect the normate

inhabitants of his community, the hero may never be completely dominated by the chaotic illness,

and the screenwriters make sure that he does not. Rather, they use the hero's perceived weakness as

a “narrative prosthesis,” a term which David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder use to describe the

dependence of storytellers on the tropes of disability (222). They argue that while the markedness of

the disabled body draws the audience in at first, it also functions as a curse of sorts, since

representations of disabilities always overshadow any other trait, either because of the audience's

interest in the trait, to the exclusion of everything else, or because the writer of a disabled character

relies on the impairment to create psychological depth.

At one point in Man of Steel Kal-El says, “I grew up in Kansas, General. I'm about as

American as it gets.” Filmmakers want to depict Superman as a relatable everyman in spite of his

ability to fly and melt things with his gaze, and his mental problems supposedly make him more

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human. However, the mental illness of Batman and Superman does not constitute a de facto

impairment. Rather, their issues functon as a narrative prosthesis which helps create a point of

departure for their respective story arcs.

The Supercrip: Triumphant in the Face of Adversity

An example of Hartnett's supercrip archetype can be found in Tom Hooper's The King's Speech

(2010), which chronicles King George VI's conquering of a speech impediment. The film presents

the king overcoming his impairment as vital, since his speeches helped unite the people in the

contemporary war effort against the notably eloquent Hitler and his reich. As a testament to the

effectiveness of such an overcoming narrative, the film was awarded with four academy awards. As

such, The King's Speech continues a line of critically lauded films explicitly dealing with disability,

including Rain Man (1988) and My Left Foot (1989). Hartnett argues that films generally show

disability as something to be overcome instead of something which can be lived with.

Some films take the logic of the overcoming narrative to the extreme, such as Clint

Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby (2004), in which Eastwood's character Frankie Dunn euthanizes his

boxing protégé Maggie after a fight leaves her paralyzed. Because Maggie's paralysis cannot be

medically cured, Frankie believes a mercy killing is ethically necessary, underlining the problem

posed by what Lennard J. Davis termed the charity model: Charity or pity are based on power

relations in which the normate always assumes the role of the other's superior. Frankie's actions

imply that people with disabilities are unable to live meaningful lives, and that if an impairment

cannot be cured, the impaired person's life has no purpose. The power relations of the charity model

position Frankie as the master of Maggie's fate, illustrating the very real danger posed by Siebers'

notion of disqualification. In the LA Times, Eastwood responded to criticism by disability rights

activists by saying that “I'm just telling a story. I don't advocate. I'm playing a part. I've gone around

in movies blowing people away with a .44 magnum. But that doesn't mean I think that's a proper

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thing to do” (Lee). Eastwood adopts the Díaz argument that representation is not approbation. And

while he may be excused for doing so, Million Dollar Baby still perpetuates stigmatizing tropes of

disability in order to further Eastwood's storytelling agenda.

Hollywood's representations of the supercrip are persistent and popular, but not the only

ones. Other media have used the supercrip archetype to combat stigmatized stereotypes of gender,

race and disability. Within the Batman universe, the secondary character Barbara Gordon has been a

symbol of disability empowerment. While the major superhero franchises have several storylines,

Barbara Gordon's paralysis has been a constant since Alan Moore's graphic novel The Killing Joke

(1988), in which she is shot by the Joker.

Barbara Gordon is invariably

shown in her wheelchair, but in spite of

this, she is never portrayed as lacking in

any other physical or mental department.

Rather, she is a master of martial arts and

has superior intellectual capabilities,

which she uses to aid Batman, calling

herself the Oracle. Gordon's tale is one

of adaptation rather than overcoming.

Since her paralysis cannot be cured, she

adapts to her new situation and makes

the most of it. Furthermore, she has not Figure 8: Barbara Gordon in her wheelchair.3

been disqualified because of her wheelchair use, but is a fully functional and valuable member of

the superhero society, one whose individual skills are an asset. Since her environment does not

hinder her in any way, Gordon could be classified as impaired rather than disabled. Applying the

3 batman.wikia.com. Online as of August 30th, 2013.

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social model to Barbara Gordon's case would reveal that the comic book universe she inhabits does

not stigmatize her wheelchair use.

By accepting her difference, Barbara Gordon rises above the supercrip archetype: “it is

crucial that a disabled person learn to accept their disability, rather than constantly struggling to rise

'above' it to 'normality'. It should not be assumed that it is the ultimate goal of a disabled person to

be cured” (Hartnett 22). It could even be argued that Gordon's impairment has allowed her to evolve

to a posthuman form: “Posthumanism questions the boundaries between human and nonhuman,

matter and discourse, technology and body, and interrogates the practices through which these

boundaries are constituted, stabilized, and destabilized” (Puar 183). While Gordon and her

wheelchair are not fused together, she depends on it for movement, but many people depend on

eyeglasses, canes, crutches, prosthetic limbs, and arguably even make-up and deoderant to augment

their bodies. Technology helps nullify physical impairments and stigmatized traits alike, blemishes

and amputated limps. Essentially, an individual who uses contact lenses and another individual who

uses a wheelchair are alike. The difference is in the sophistication of the different technologies, but

the use itself is integral to Davis' notion of the dismodern era, which “ushers in the concept that […]

technology is not separate but part of the body” (Davis, Bending 26). Gordon's reliance on her

wheelchair is not essentially different from Batman's conspicuous use of gadgets, but because of the

stigmatized nature of her impairment, it has been the source of much discussion.

In 2011, the owner of the Batman franchise, DC Comics, relaunched many of its storylines

in an initiative dubbed “The New 52.” In this incarnation, Gordon's paralysis has been cured, as per

the directions of the medical model. Gail Simone, the author of some Barbara Gordon storylines,

has publicly asked why comics do not mirror the demographic make-up of American society: “Why

in the world can we not do a better job of representation of not just humanity, but also our own loyal

audience?” (Hudson). Art may mirror life, but in this case, minorities are grossly under- and mis-

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represented. Apparently, mainstream audiences are not ready to accept stigmatized others as the

protagonists they are meant to relate to. While the comic book medium was inclusive in its counter-

cultural depiction of Barbara Gordon as the Oracle, contemporary sensibilities have facilitated her

cure, and with it, her return to comparative normalcy. Gordon's healing is symptomatic of the ableist

tendency to only use normates as protagonists, such as the white, male, muscular bodies that

dominate Hollywood. It would seem that if characters deviate from the demarcated archetypes of

contemporary fiction, there can be no room for them in the narratives.

Anatomy of Evil: The Villainous Body

More often than not villains tend to be physically abnormal: scarred, deformed, or mutilated. (Reader 9)

I believe what doesn't kill you simply makes you stranger. (The Dark Knight)

Freighted with anxieties about loss of control and autonomy that the American ideal repudiates, 'the disabled' become a threatening presence, seemingly compromised by the particularities and limitations of their own bodies. (Thomson 41)

In The Dark Knight, the Joker points out that the supercrip and evil avenger archetypes are not too

far apart. In an encounter with Batman, he foresees the superhero's eventual redundancy: “Don't talk

like one of them, you're not! Even if you'd like to be. To them, you're just a freak, like me. They

need you right now. But when they don't, they'll cast you out, like a leper.” When Batman has re-

established order in Gotham, the Joker envisages his opponent's enfreakment and estrangement

from society. Jewett and Lawrence argued that, having served his purpose, the hero of the American

monomyth becomes separate from society. This holds true for superheroes as well; their purpose

lies in defeating the antagonist. Afterwards, they have no function in their community, and their

extraordinary bodies no longer carry positive connotations, but become an anti-democratic threat

and a source of stigma. The superhero's difference is only tolerable when society becomes

threatened.

Christian Bale's performance as Batman received much less critical and popular attention

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than the character of the Joker, played by Heath Ledger, who died before the film premired. John G.

Cawelti has argued that because of their deviance, “the villains are often more interesting, various,

and enjoyable. As in the classic gangster film, I am inclined to believe that in the superhero stories

we secretly root for the villain” (163). If details make compelling characters, the character who

deviates the most from the norm must be the most interesting. In The Dark Knight, Ledger's

character appears as a grotesque clown who uses make-up to cover vast facial scars. As in the case

of Junot Díaz's Beli character, the scarification signifies a traumatic event of the past, one which has

defined the Joker. The character is made compelling because of this trait: “The normal, routine,

average, and familiar (by definition) fail to mobilize the storytelling effort because they fall short of

the litmus test of exceptionality. The anonymity of normalcy is no story at all” (Mitchell & Snyder

228). The Joker playfully teases the audience and the characters of the film as to the origins of his

scars:

So I had a wife. She was beautiful, like you. Who tells me I worry too much. Who tells me I ought to

smile more. Who gambles and gets in deep with the sharks. One day, they carve her face. And we have no

money for surgeries. She can't take it. I just want to see her smile again. I just want her to know that I

don't care about the scars. So I stick a razor in my mouth and do this to myself. And you know what? She

can't stand the sight of me! She leaves. Now I see the funny side. Now I'm always smiling! ( The Dark

Knight)

The villain knows that the powerful narrative behind his scars makes him an interesting, worthwhile

character. In the film, he gives different accounts of the origin of his scars, but the tale is always a

tragic one. The implication is that the Joker's insanity stems from the same, unclear incident that

covered his face in scars, illustrating the coherence between inner and outer disability in the

Hollywood film.

For all his bravado and ability, the Joker is the opposite of the supercrip; Martin Norden

terms this archetype the “evil avenger”, defined as “the stereotype of disabled baddies seeking

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revenge for the bad deal they have been dealt in life” (Hartnett 21). Whereas Batman and Superman

both overcome their mental disability, the corporal ruination of the Joker (The Dark Knight), Bane

(The Dark Knight Rises), and in an older movie, the Penguin (Batman Returns, 1992), reflect their

mental bitterness. As in the case of Ephialtes and the Ephors, “the corporeal body of disability is

represented as manifesting its own internal symptoms” (Reader 230). The evil avenger archetype

suggests that physiognomics, although not a field of study anymore, still appear latently in

contemporary cultural artifacts, even if the philosophy of science has long since moved on. The

answer may reside in Melville and Lerner's just world hypothesis; people need to believe that an

individual's lot in life correlates with this individual's moral fortitude. Thus, ugliness, deformity and

the like suggests that the ugly or deformed individual has done something to deserve his

predicament. The just world hypothesis may thus explain why Franklin D. Roosevelt's paralysis was

kept hidden from the public (Davis, Bending 42). Although using a wheelchair would not directly

influence his leadership abilities, Roosevelt knew that the stigma associated with wheelchairs would

negatively impact his image (Goffman 33). Male pattern baldness, ostensibly a benign trait, affects

up to seventy percent of males, but in spite of this, the last elected president to suffer from baldness

was Dwight D. Eisenhower, suggesting that the slightest deviation provokes doubt and suspicion in

people.

In film, villains are represented as deviants because this will instantly make the audience

recognize that something is inherently wrong with him, externally and internally. Antagonists are

flawed because of their inability to deal with their fate, but while the audience may sometimes be

asked to briefly sympathize with the villain, as in the case of Ephialtes, ultimately the audience

understands that the deviant has been consumed by bitterness. The villain represents a sore on

society's body that must be eliminated to restore order, in accordance with the American monomyth:

“Visible degeneracy, impotency, congenital deformity, festering ulcerations, and bleeding wounds

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[…] provide the constrastive bodily coordinates to the muscular, aesthetic, and symmetrical bodies

of the healthy citizenry” (Mitchell & Snyder 234). The manifestation of the villain's depravity is a

calculated affront to the collective gaze of the viewers on behalf of the filmmakers.

The supercrip and evil avenger archetypes are problematic because they allow for little

variety. Disability becomes a dichotomic concept, instead of allowing for the myriad little

differences that constitute human difference in real life. In the world of Hollywood, one is either an

unmarked normate, a supercrip or a monstrous villain. The superhero may position himself in the

grey area between supercrip and normate, but as I have argued, his impairment is mostly a narrative

ploy used to make the character interesting.

Villains, on the other hand, are enveloped by a “single, stigmatic trait” (Thomson 11).

Ephialtes is defined by his otherness; Bane, the principal villain of The Dark Knight Rises says that

“Nobody cared who I was until I put on the mask.” Bane's dominant visual characteristic sets him

apart from all of his henchmen and makes his story the most interesting. In 300, the same logic

applies. The uniform soldiers, Persian or Spartan, are not interesting enough to engage the audience.

The extraordinary bodies of Xerxes and Ephialtes create the narrative impetus of the film.

The overriding, stigmatic trait also makes the Joker appear as an embodiment of mental

illness that Batman must ritualistically defeat in order to restore order to Gotham, the city they

inhabit. All of this is in accordance with Lawrence and Jewett's American monomyth.

Figure 9: Rogues' gallery of the Batman universe. The Joker, Two-Face (both from The Dark Knight) and Bane (The

Dark Knight Rises)

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The threat posed by the villains in Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy consists of their otherness

tainting the community. The superhero then becomes an agent of imposing normalcy. Batman

enforces the medical model, curing society by eliminating visually deviating individuals, such as

Bane, depicted as a hybrid between man and machine. Whereas Barbara Gordon functions as a

symbol of the positive effects of technology, Bane appears as an evil manifestation of

posthumanism.

Filmmakers intentionally use contrasts to portay the difference between protagonist and

antagonist. Whereas the American hero is understood to defend democracy, his opponent is often a

totalitarian or anarchist. Bane, the principal villain of The Dark Knight Rises, attempts to incite riot

in Gotham. When taking his abnormal, posthuman physique into account, Bane's attempt to strike

back against the society that has marginalized him can be understood as an attack of desperation.

Alexis de Tocqueville prophesied in Democracy in America (2007) that “If ever the free institutions

of America are destroyed, that event may be attributed to the unlimited authority of the majority,

which may at some future time urge the minorities to desperation, and oblige them to have recourse

to physical force. Anarchy will then be the result, but it will have been brought about by despotism”

(Tocqueville 219). As in the case of 300, The Dark Knight Rises can be understood as a warning of

the tyranny of normalcy, but it is a warning that goes unheeded, as the audience cheers Bane's

defeat at the hands of Batman.

Bam! Sock! Pow! Depiction of Violence in Superhero Films

When heroes and villains do battle, cities are ruined. Critics have commented on the use of 9/11-

related imagery in superhero films since Spider-Man. The usage of terror-related associations hardly

comes as a surprise, considering that superhero films blossomed in the years following the terrorist

attack. In Man of Steel, Superman and his opponent, General Zod, throw each other through

skyscraper after skyscraper in downtown Metropolis, the fictional city in which the film takes place.

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The tumbling structures are clearly drawing upon the mythology of 9/11, but the violence done to

bodies in the film should also be scrutinized. In the same scene, the two characters are winded, but

physically unscathed after having laid the city to waste. Their superpowers supposedly justify their

corporal invunerability, but the indestructibility of their bodies also makes their characters

emotionally unrelatable. Batman does not suffer from this, because underneath his body armor and

gadgets, he is still human. In The Dark Knight Rises, Bane breaks Batman's back, although the hero

makes a miraculous, and unrealistic, recovery. The audience might not expect realism from films

based on comic books, but since the filmmakers draw upon 9/11 and contemporary social issues,

they are also asking to be taken serious by critics and audience alike. However, the depiction of

violence undermines the artistic effort. Contrary to the violence of immigrant literature, superhero

films depict the epic clashes between good and evil as being largely bloodless. Some films, such as

Kick-Ass (2010) and Kick-Ass 2 (2013) do oppose the trend. The director of these films, Mark

Millar, has stated that “Kick-Ass avoids the usual bloodless body-count of most big summer

pictures and focuses instead of (sic) the CONSEQUENCES (sic) of violence, whether it's the

ramifications for friends and family or, as we saw in the first movie, Kick-Ass spending six months

in hospital after his first street altercation” (Millar). (Note that Kick-Ass is both the film's title and

the name of the protagonist). Zack Snyder's Man of Steel and 300 in particular do not in the same

way explore the consequences of vigilante violence.

Superhero films represent a cleansing of all deviating subjects from society, but they also

represent this standardization as a sanitized process, failing to adequately represent the

consequences of violence. Filmmakers are forced to compromise their artistic vision by seeking to

maximize the number of people who buy a ticket to their works. In order to do so, they must

conform to MPAA ratings, which try to determine the appropriate age for sexual and violent themes,

among other parameters. While these ratings are intended to shield children and adolescents from

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brutal violence, it can be argued that by creating images of sanitized violence, filmmakers are

paradoxically desensitizing those they seek to protect. Representing heroic bodies as homogeneous,

villains as deviants, and violence as unrealistically bloodless, the films preserve a distorted image of

the body and its functions by glossing over human fragility. People who are already stigmatized

stand to lose the most from this. Junot Díaz argues that he consciously chooses not to use realism to

get his point across; filmmakers may do the same, but in these superhero films, their artistic visions

generally seem limited and less progressive when compared to immigrant fiction. The authors of

immigrant literature emphasize the human cost of oppression whereas these Hollywood films tacitly

justify stigmatization. Directors, producers and screenwriters should not shoulder all the blame for

this tendency, since they tailor their films to suit the market. Additionally, the audience may not

want to face the memento mori of torn-off limbs and ruined bodies. Additionally, the aftermath of

the Columbine shootings resulted in criticism of violence in audiovisual media. A father to one of

the students killed in the school shooting said that “There must be sacrifices by the entertainment

industry. It's not enough that the good guys win in the end. We're being numbed by portrayals of

violence. This is not entertainment and it certainly isn't art. There must also be sacrifices by those

who promote gun shows and those who promote unlimited access to guns. Americans are saying

'Enough is enough.'” (danielmauser.com). I would argue the opposite; representing the superhero's

enemies as hordes of robotic creatures, as in The Avengers, or conflict as a bloodless process, as in

Man of Steel and the Batman trilogy, will only estrange audiences from the true nature of violence.

Instead of glossing over the act of killing, films could do as Mark Millar suggests and examine the

brutality behind the American monomyth.

Superhero films have tried to circumvent the depiction of bodily violence by drawing upon a

the national trauma of 9/11. By using imagery of crumbling skyscrapers, superhero films such as

Man of Steel use 9/11 to convey the stakes of the film's conflict, mirroring Junot Díaz's use of

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medical language as a metaphor for the immigrant experience. Unlike Junot Díaz, the Hollywood

films do not allow the audience time to reflect upon the imagery, and the metaphor becomes lost in

the spectacle of computer-generated effects. Even superhero films that represent violence as bloody

do so in an overly stylized and hyperbolic manner. Such a representation warps the audience's

understanding of the body as much as the representation in which violence seemingly does not

visually harm the body's integrity.

In the logic of superhero films, the violent treatment of villains are the means to an end, “the

repair of deviance,” which ”may involve an obliteration of the difference through a 'cure,' the rescue

of the despised object from social censure, the examination of the deviant as a purification of the

social body, or the revaluation of an alternative mode of being” (Mitchell & Snyder 227). The

superhero acts as an agent of the medical model, surgically removing the villain, who represents an

infenction in the organism of society. However, this metaphorical surgery is represented as a

bloodless act, obscuring the human cost of the process. According to Rick Moody, Hollywood films

“say these things, but they are more polite about it, lest they should offend” (Moody). Ultimately,

the preoccuption of Hollywood is making money, and because of this, they intentionally appeal to

the largest demographics. As a consequence, others are used as antagonists, since the normate

defines himself by what he is not, and those who are already disenfranchised are more easily

portrayed negatively. Belief in what Melville and Lerner term a just world makes the Hollywood

ending, in which the villain is dispatched by the hero, a necessity. If the antagonist should prevail,

the audience's world view would be challenged. Upsetting the audience could potentially prove

disastrous for the film's revenue. Thus, the financial aspect of Hollywood stifles creativity and helps

perpetuate the formula of the American monomyth.

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Democratic Implications of the Superhero

You are too busy being bludgeoned by the sounds and lights. Nevertheless, the message is there. Might is right, the global economy will be restored, America is exceptional, homely people deserve political disenfranchisement, and so on. (Moody)

Something new, something peculiar to democracy, the tyranny of public opinion [...] It was disapproval of, and hostility and ostracism toward, those who would not conform, and it affected chiefly those whose convictions were superficial or whose courage was weak or whose positions were vulnerable. (Commager 829).

In The Dark Knight, Batman faces a dilemma: he has a device available to him that will allow him

to combat the Joker, but in doing so, he will betray the democratic ideals for which he claims to

fight. This metaphor for Big Brother politics in post-9/11 America echoes the issue of the

superhero's anti-democratic aspects. In The Myth of the American Superhero, Jewett and Lawrence

question the popularity of vigilante figures that seems incompatible with the American notion of

democracy: “Are these stories safety valves for the stresses of democracy, or do they represent a

yearning for something other than democracy? And why do women and people of color, who have

made significant strides in civil rights, contnue to remain almost wholly subordinate in a mythscape

where communities must almost always be rescued by physically powerful white men?” (8) Jewett

and Lawrence also touch upon the under- and misrepresentation of minorities in the genre. If

democracy and inclusion are co-dependent, the continued marginalization of others in artistic

representations is problematic. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has pointed out that the paradoxical

nature of the democratic hero comes from the hero's need to appear superior, and disabled figures

provide a practical backdrop in this construction: “Cast as one of society's ultimate 'not me' figures,

the disabled other absorbs disavowed elements of this cultural self, becoming an icon of all human

vulnerability and enabling the 'American Ideal' to appear as master of both destiny and self” (41).

Impaired bodies serve to gauge what the American ideal is not. In Robert Murphy's personal

account of living with disability, The Body Silent (1990), he argues that people with disabilities are

marginalized because of the threat they pose to the American ideal, an ideal that presupposes

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ableness:

Most handicapped people, myself included, sense that others resent them for this reason: We are subverters of

an American ideal, just as the poor are betrayers of the American Dream. And to the extent that we depart from

the ideal, we become ugly and repulsive to the able-bodied. People recoil from us, especially where there is

facial damage or bodily distortion. The disabled serve as constant, visible reminders to the able-bodied that the

society they live in is shot through with inequity and suffering, that they live in a counterfeit paradise, that they

are too vulnerable. (Murphy 116-117)

This may partly answer why disability is pushed to the margins of society; disabled bodies obstruct

the view of America as the land of opportunities.

The superhero fits neatly into what Lawrence and Jewett call the “American formula of the

standard superheroic character.” The fact that the hero is formulaic and conforms to a standard

means he fits in; the heterogeneous villains do not. When the hero defeats the scarred body of his

othered opponent, he makes society more aesthetically pleasing by obscuring the issues that still

plague it: “This is perhaps the ultimate fantasy embodied in the myth of the vigilante: the use of

individually controlled violence to create the ideal suburb” (Cawelti 166). Heroic violence is the

ritual that must be completed in order to restore society to normal..

According to Erving Goffman, “The notion of 'normal human being' may have its source in

the medical approach to humanity or in the tendency of large-scale bureacratic organizations, such

as the nation state, to treat all members in some respects as equal” (Goffman 17). The democratic

belief that every body is equal fails to take into account bodily deviance. In recent history, political

action has been taken to compensate for prejudice in society, such as affirmative action for African

Americans. The belief that all individuals are born equal keeps able-bodied individuals at the top of

the social hierarchy, while opportunities for those with othered bodies remain limited. Echoing

affirmative action, some disability scholars have asked filmmakers to cast people with disabilities to

portray characters with extraordinary features and have likened able-bodied actors playing disabled

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characters to the theatre tradition of blackface (Gardner). So far, Hollywood insists on using the

able-bodied and beautiful for most roles.

The depiction of bodies in Hollywood movies helps to reinforce the established social order,

making the overcoming narrative the only available life story to the disabled person. Fictional

heroes, while supposedly defending the ideals of America, ultimately imply that they only defend

those who can and will conform to society's norms. Others are cast as dangerous deviants, who need

to be eliminated for the greater good.

In The Dark Knight, Batman pins his hopes on the upstanding district attourney Harvey

Dent. The virtuous Dent exemplifies all that is needed in a democratic utopia, most importantly

willingness and ability to navigate governmental bureaucracy. After Dent is marred by an explosion,

the familiar tale of the evil avenger unfolds once again. Having been enfreaked by his mutilation,

Dent becomes the supervillain Two-Face, and as the American monomyth suggests, only the extra-

legal force of Batman can stop Dent, now an embodiment of corrupt politics and the ostensibly

bloated government. The narrative logic of superhero fiction demands interventionist methods.

Fortunately for the audience, the power-wielding superhero never seems interested in using his

powers to further his own ends.

In a post-9/11 world, it seems as if audiences have accepted the habitual use of tyrannical

power to combat otherness. The ideals on which America was founded has been compromised and

executive power has been handed to the hero, but the redistribution of power does nothing to help

stigmatized individuals. These enfreaked others are present as a conceptualization of the enemy that

society must be rid of. Thus, marginalization becomes inherent in America's most popular fiction.

In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville suggested that in a democratic society, the

majority will attempt to tyrannically govern minorities. In an essay on Tocqueville's book, Henry

Steele Commager sums up Tocqueville's fears: “Under the dominion of certain laws, democracy

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would extinguish that liberty of the mind in which the democratic social condition is favorable, so

that after having broken all that bondage once imposed upon it by ranks or by men, the human mind

would be closely fettered to the general will by the greatest number” (Commager 828). Commager

concludes that Tocqueville's notion of a majority tyranny were unfounded, but in light of my

analysis of Hollywood fiction, the tyranny of normalcy does not seem far-fetched.

Summary

In this chapter, I have examined the role of the body in the popular genre of Hollywood's superhero

films. Initially, I present Zack Snyder's 300 as a cultural signifier for the fear of otherness in society.

I use Snyder's film as a point of departure for disussing bodily representation in the superhero film

wave of which it is part.

Filmmakers construct the superhero as a liminal character between normate and other,

although the superheroic body is always represented as being homogeneous. I have juxtaposed the

hero with his opponent, the supervillain, often shown as a marginalized individual who has been

consumed by his stigma. The depiction of a physically othered individual as an evil avenger

perpetuates a view of people with disabilities as troubled individuals who are defined by their

undesirable traits. I have argued that the superhero acts as an agent on behalf of society, cleansing

the metaphorical body of the community by eliminating the blemish that is the supervillain. In

doing so, the superhero maintains what Jewett and Lawrence call the American monomyth, a

process which necessitates and justifies violence as a means of maintaining order. Violence is a

valid strategy precisely because of the villain's otherness. Melville and Lerner argue that audiences

understand bodily deviance as manifesting immorality and other stigmatized mental traits. Thus, the

villain's abnormal body becomes enfreaked and a symptom of his evil, making the violent conflict

seem inevitable and just.

Finally, I have discussed the paradoxical nature of the superhero as a defender of democracy.

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I argue that his violent treatment of deviants mirror real-life stigmatization and point to hidden

issues in society. The spectacle of the superhero film may serve to keep the audience distracted from

the inequity in American society.

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Conclusion

Impairment is the rule, and normalcy is the fantasy. Dependence is the reality, and independence grandiose thinking. (Davis, Bending 31)

This thesis elucidates the narrative role of the othered body in contemporary American literary

fiction and film. By first constructing a framework with which to read cultural artifacts in a

disability context, I created a common ground which would make readings of immigrant fiction and

Hollywood movies comparable. In particular, I wanted to examine what modern cultural

expressions implicitly convey about inclusion of othered bodies in contemporary society.

I have argued that American immigrant writers succesfully use standpoint theory to create

fiction which can help break down barriers based primarily on racialized and othered bodies.

Writers like Junot Díaz choose to break the American tradition of using able-bodied characters as

protagonists in order to create sympathy within the audience for a character which, according to

himself, they might not even like. Using the stigmatized Oscar Cabral as a new, imperfect

everyman, Díaz invites those who think of themselves as normates to experience the unhappiness of

stigmatization, and in so doing, Díaz hopes to make society more inclusive by appealing to the

audience's sense of pity. Drawing upon what Lennard J. Davis has termed the charity model, Díaz

represents Oscar as being intermittently pathetic. The audience are invited to take pity on him,

which undermines Díaz's attempt to make the audience connect with Oscar as an equal, since the

charity model perpetuates the pitied individual's situation as the inferior part in a relationship based

on power.

The Chinese-American writers Yiyun Li and Ha Jin demonstrate how the American dream is

more appealing to citizens in a totalitarian system. Li does so by keeping the United States as an

unspoken utopia in those of her short stories that do not explicitly deal with America. By framing

Mao's enforcers as brutes who kill adults and children indiscriminately, Yiyun Li, like Díaz, also

75


appeals to the audience's pity. Furthermore, Li depicts the body of Mao-era Chinese people as

unmarked puppets existing solely for use at the discretion of the governing elite. Yiyun Li's Chinese

must escape the oppression of Mao in order to gain agency, and the must appealing way of doing

this is by coming to America.

Ha Jin, like Yiyun Li, accepts the American dream more fully than Junot Díaz. Ha Jin agrees

with Li that the human body must be situated in a democratic space in order to fulfil its potential. In

Ha Jin's China, personal happiness is rendered impossible by stigmatization from government and

other citizens. Because of Mao's oppression, the Chinese people are forced to hide the details that

might qualify them as fully rounded human beings in a Western sense. Instead, Jin chronicles how

the Chinese government ignores different bodily configuration, as when they expect everybody to

procreate in order to strengthen Communist China. In Yiyun Li and Ha Jin's China, human bodies

exist in large numbers, but to the government, they are unmarked. In the eyes of other Chinese,

however, details serve as a weakness to which others may attach negative connotations. In Waiting,

othered bodies are not allowed to exist in peace from curious others. Waiting's protagonist, Lin

Kong, has been permeated by society's obsession over marked bodies to the point where he cannot

have a meaningful relationship with his wife, Shuyu, because her feet are bound. Thus, Waiting

chronicles the disqualification of otherwise healthy beings on the basis of a single, stigmatic trait.

In the case of all three authors, the body takes the role of a communicative platform used to

convey the oppressive and traumatizing past of American immigrants. By using violence as a

universal language that transcends cultural barriers, the authors successfully infuse literature with

autobiographical elements. Thus, they transform fictional literature into a weapon with which to

combat stigmatization and oppression.

Whereas immigrant literature highlight the humanity of their protagonists, Hollywood films

use the othered body as a means of perpetuating the formula of the American monomyth. I have

76


shown how Hollywood films that correspond to the American monomyth often draw upon tropes of

disability to create a simple good-evil dichotomy. Othering the villain supposedly makes the

audience accept his inevitably violent demise without dwelling on the ethical implications. By

casting the othered body in an antagonistic role and juxtaposing it with the ideal body of the

superhero, the superhero film draws upon cultural mores of disabilities. Physiognomics, although

not actively studied anymore, still appear latently in the just world hypothesis, and superhero films

preserve the idea that evil manifests itself in bodily otherness. Paradoxically, filmmakers often

attempt to make the superhero appear othered, often by suggesting mental issues. However, the just

world maxim that condemns the villain as sick because of his appearance is mirrored in the

depiction of the hero as a white, male, healthy, muscular man, making his supposed mental issues a

transparent attempt to deepen his character by use of a narrative prosthesis. Thus, the superhero

fiction attempts to draw upon the markedness that turns Oscar Cabral into a compelling character,

but the filmmakers' hesitance to commit to a realistic depiction of disability makes them settle for

the supercrip archetype.

If the major cultural expressions accurately depict tendencies in their contemporary

societies, the modern superhero film suggests that people with disabilities are still met with

suspicion. In films like 300, disability, along with sexual and racial deviance, is framed as a reason

to perpetuate colonialist attitudes towards the Middle East. The narrative logic of 300 follows the

medical model in its view of disability as something to be cured, either medically or violently.

Not only disabled people are threatened by the logic of the superhero narrative: the

American monomyth legitimizes vigilante action by continuing the tradition of the frontier hero in

the disguise of superhero costumes. According to films like Man of Steel and the Batman trilogy,

violence against others is just, because they threaten to overthrow the normative peace of the

community. Thus Hollywood actively works to disqualify those who deviate from the artificial

77


construction of Rosemarie Garland-Thomson's normate. Ironically, the films do so while ostensibly

fighting to preserve democracy. However, the Hollywood notion of democracy is not unlike Alexis

de Tocqueville's vision of a democratic dystopia in which the majority rule works to keep deviants

in hierarchically weak positions.

If art imitates life, artists should attempt to more accurately depict the demographic make-up

of society. Since nearly twenty per cent of Americans are disabled, it is strange that so few

storytellers attempt to accurately depict life as an other. I have suggested that the audience is partly

to blame, since the financial situation of Hollywood necessitates making more films like the ones

that do well. Some contemporary popular films, such as Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby, do depict

disability, but they do so in a way that perpetuates the idea that only normates truly deserve to live.

Smaller media, such as comic books, have attempted to empower disabled characters, as in the case

of Barbara Gordon. Once again, it would seem that a disabled protagonist does not intrigue the

audience enough to keep Barbara Gordon, the wheelchair user, in print.

While immigrant writers attempt to provide a voice for othered bodies, Hollywood

endeavours to drown out their counter-narrative in its computer-generated spectacles. Immigrant

literature succesfully applies standpoint theory to broaden the horizon of the audience whereas the

mainstream Hollywood film perpetuates disability as a form of otherness that must be eradicated.

Thus, immigrant fiction combats the normative Hollywood protagonist and the narrative system of

which he is part, a system which threatens to sanitize society. Immigrant literature, on the other

hand, celebrates otherness by raising awareness of othered bodies. While less financially risky films

can provide the same sort of voice that immigrant writers do, the financial restrictions in

filmmaking means that inhabitants of deviant bodies should support authors in an attempt to subvert

the American monomyth that perpetuates the oppression of otherness.

78


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Documents

"The Deviant Body" - MA Thesis