Delightful Disruptions: Rhetorical and Semiotic Constructions of Disability in Children's Cinema

Cinema is a powerful arena for the representation and invention of social identities, including portrayals of disability. Where avant garde or 'independent' adult-oriented cinema may push the boundaries of social acceptability, cinema marketed to children---so-called 'family movies'--- invariably 'play it safe.' For this reason, children's cinema may function as an important bellwether for changes in social attitudes: something being deemed 'suitable for children' is likely a sign of its mainstreaming. This dissertation reports the first study to date concerned specifically with depictions of disability in cinema targeting children; it also seeks to move beyond the kinds of taxonomical accounts of disability representation in many studies of adult cinema, as well as moving beyond neatly binarized assessments of these representations as either 'positive' or 'negative'. Framed by theoretical discussions in Disability Studies---especially models of disability/impairment---and in Cinema Studies, I present my close readings of a sample of ten children's films produced between 1989 to 2006: Monsters Inc., Lilo and Stich, Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Secret Garden, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Finding Nemo, Shrek, Shrek 2, and Happy Feet. My readings are informed by key concepts from two allied traditions of textual analysis (Rhetoric and Visual Semiotics); as such, my focus throughout is on the range of linguistic, visual and non-linguistic auditory markers or signifiers---by which disability is conceived---or staged---in each of the films. On this basis, I identify a series of four dominant rhetorics (or discourses) about the nature of disability and its place in the world---both the diegetic world of the film and the spectatorial world of the audience. Each of my substantive chapters centers two different films and traces the way these four dominant rhetorics make claims (and counter-claims) about the disabled body as 'alien', 'redeemable', 'unloveable' and 'impaired'. While the films reproduce a range of discriminatory social discourses reflecting each of the main theoretical models in Disability Studies, they also invite more complicated (e.g. intersectional) readings, made possible by the inherent polysemy of cinematic texts, especially in fantasy and animation genres. In this way, children's cinema can---and increasingly does---present agreeable, sympathetic representations of characters who are 'different' in ambiguous ways, although in ways that may also conflate or trivialize the distinctive, political life-world of disabled people/characters. Nonetheless, it is the very ambiguity and 'palatability' of these cinematic representations that makes them 'safe' in production and marketing terms, which, in turn, means that children's cinema may well---and sometimes does---end up disrupting social boundaries and challenging prejudices in unexpected ways.