Why Disability Identity Matters: An Intertextual Analysis

My reading selection this week is created by Carrie Sandhal, she has written an excerpt for the Disability Studies Reader written by Leonard Davis. The title of the piece Sandhal wrote is, “Why Disability Identity Matters: From Dramaturgy to Casting in John Belluso’s Pyretown”. I have selected this piece because of a recent outing in our community I attended titled the Sprout Film Festival. The Sprout Film Festival is the only distributor of films exclusively featuring people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. The text I’ve chosen directly relates to my experience at the Sprout Film Festival, and has given me the opportunity to gain real life experience in supporting disabled theater community. For the purpose of this paper I will discuss the importance of disabled actors playing disabled characters.
Within the current adaptions of disabled characters on screen few are currently played by disabled actors. Sandhal refers to this as the “traditional” disability theater, and presents a new concept termed “New Disability Theater”. New disability theater according to Sandhal, “aims to explore the lived experience of disability, rather than the usual dramaturgical use of
The American ideology of pulling yourself up by the bootstraps has been a highly depicted story for disabled characters, and Sandhal states by changing the overcoming narrative, “creates opportunities for both characters and audiences to creative imaginative identifications (457)”, and acts as a catalyst for social change. Another factor that creates change in the depiction of disabled characters is by introducing intersectionality into a characters storyline. “Disability remains a metaphor, however intersectionality complicates characters, thus refusing to make disability carry the burden of the primary problem”