Disability and Desire
Do disabled characters in film and TV misrepresent sexuality?
There’s a scene that stands out to me from the 2004 film Ray.
When Jamie Foxx, playing Ray Charles, runs his fingers along a woman’s wrist to sense her overall appearance, I remembered my blind friends from back at summer camp putting the same move on some of our unsuspecting female campers and counselors. Sure, it’s a little lecherous, but it seems that Foxx and whoever wrote that scene really did their research.
I showed that clip to my students as part of a presentation on how disabled characters in movies and TV aren’t typically depicted as objects of or with desire. Most of the time, they’re written as asexual or otherwise incapable of having a “normal” love life. Here are some examples:
Me Before You (2016)
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996)
That notion not only informs non-disabled audiences but also reflects back onto people with a disability and affects their own perceptions of sexuality, according to researchers.
“Stigma can lead individuals to internalize concepts of asexuality and may negatively impact confidence, desire, and ability to find a partner while distorting one’s overall sexual self-concept.”
Don’t just take it from the ivory tower. In this short documentary, people with a disability discuss these frustrations.
When disabled characters are actually shown to have amorous feelings, their attraction is largely heterosexual. In a report last year, GLAAD found that of the 468 LGBTQ+ characters on broadcast, cable, and streaming platform series, only 18 had a disability, a number it cause “ludicrously low” compared with the actual population.
One exception from some years back was Special on Netflix. It stars, and is based on the autobiography of, Ryan O’Connell, a gay man with cerebral palsy. The show was honored by the Ruderman Family Foundation in 2018 as the only production that featured a disabled LGBTQ+ character authentically portrayed by an actor with the same condition.
There’s nothing wrong with not having sexual feelings, as one of my students who identified as non-binary, asexual, and having a learning condition reminded me in an assignment. And a growing number of characters, disabled or not, are explicitly written as asexual.
Some other students also challenged my assumptions after watching this memorable moment from Forrest Gump.
I showed this clip and asked my class to point out the common disability stereotype at play here: the victim, the fool, the hero, or the villain. My take had always been that this scene was written for a laugh; Forrest is too childlike to understand the advances of a woman and winds up ruining her roommate’s bathrobe.
But a few of my students took a different view. They saw Forrest as a victim and Jenny as someone who took advantage of this guy who she knew was, well, “stupid is as stupid does.”
I wonder if their understanding of the scene was shaped by the Me Too reckoning. There’s no doubt that if the genders of these characters were reversed, that interaction would be considered assault.
What’s your opinion? Was Forrest just a sexually inexperienced goof, or was he the prey of a predatory Jenny? Let me know your take, and I might publish it in the next newsletter.
For Further Viewing
Code of the Freaks— A 2020 documentary film that looks at the history of disability representation in cinema, directed by Salome Chasnoff. Some of the speakers can’t recall a movie that depicts a sexual relationship between two disabled characters.
Guest Room— A 2015 short film starring Lauren Potter and Michael Iovine that depicts a couple wit