UC San Diego

The study of disability has long been a matter left to medical interpretation. In fact, disability has often been and continues to be viewed as a personal misfortune, individual defect, and genetic failure. Disability in the medical model has thus been seen as something to eradicate or at least prevent. This approach to disability then, means correcting, normalizing, and or eliminating the pathological individual from society in which there are standards of what bodies and lives are considered normal and healthy (i.e., eugenics). Western society has long acted on the belief that disability presents as a threat to the future. Much of that has since changed when disability studies programs and activism emerged to addresses disability in its full complexity. In considering the work of Mike Oliver (1983), Lennard Davis (1995), Rosemarie Garland Thomson (1997; 2009), David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder (2000), Lee Edelman (2004), Ato Quayson (2007), Tobin Siebers (2008), and Alison Kafer (2013), and I build my argument of reimagining terms of ability and disability in fundamentally different ways.In my dissertation, “Surviving Dystopia: Desiring Disability and Deliberate Cripping in Apocalyptic Film," I offer alternative disability narratives in three apocalyptic films, A Quiet Place (2018), Bird Box (2018), and The Silence (2019). In these films, desiring disability is a future-oriented approach that offers viable ways forward. I argue that dystopian worlds carved out in post-apocalyptic scenarios offer critiques and expand worlds that had previously cast disability aside or expunged it. The films examined in this dissertation serve as a new understanding of how disability is used as a metaphor or plot point (Mitchell and Snyder, 2000) or the way disability causes visceral reactions between disabled characters and nondisabled readers (Quayson, 2007). Specifically, this dissertation focuses, perhaps counter-intuitively, on the advantages of considering disability in moments of catastrophe and chaos.