Responding to the Presidential Theme of “Family Resemblances” and call to include “scholars of different ranks [...] of many nations” we assembled early-career scholars working on four national screens: USA, UK, Argentina and South Korea. Their family “resemblance”—a focus on screen disability—is balanced by “divergence and uniqueness”—in geography and genre (horror/sci-fi, psychological thriller, drama), and theoretical approaches.
Colby Payne opens with “Ability, Empathy, and the Alien in Under the Skin (UK, 2013)” by examining Jonathan Glazer’s film Under the Skin, a work that follows an unnamed alien in Scotland, as she collects and kills men for undefined purposes. Glazer’s film adapts Michel Faber’s novel of the same name, and while the film’s protagonist is not explicitly disabled as in the novel, the film is nonetheless concerned with her ability and lack thereof. Payne’s paper deploys Garland-Thomson’s concept of ‘fitting,’ as well as Sara Ahmed’s work on the phenomenology of embodiment, to examine how the film depicts its protagonist as unable to fit within a normative human hegemony due to her alienness.
In “Cripping the Illness Narrative: Invisible Disability in Todd Haynes’ Safe (USA, 1995)” Danielle K. Nelson argues that Safe’s illness narrative emerges as an invisible disability whose symptoms ebb and flow with the genre conventions of a psychological thriller. Set in 80s LA, Safe tells the story of Carol White, a homemaker with a mysterious illness. With wide-angle shots, Haynes keeps the viewer at a distance from its protagonist while Carol is pictured in relation to her social context. Even as her illness is hypervisible through physical symptoms, her malady is dismissed by men and healthcare professionals. By collapsing her symptoms as both literal—she is sick—and metaphorical—the ills of capitalism, ableism, and cisheteropatriarchy—the depiction of illness proliferates meaning by sliding in and out of metaphor. Resisting biomedical certainty and illness as a figurative byproduct of social conditioning, Carol’s illness demonstrates the stakes of how we represent invisible disabilities—particularly for gendered bodies—while posing a resistance to the expectation that the film’s ending should reassure spectators that Carol will “get better.”
Caglar Erteber’s “The Disabled and Marginalized Eye: Dismantling Representations of Abnormality in El Marginal (Argentina, 2016–2022)” examines an unfiltered portrayal of prison life, where marginalized and disabled identities struggle to survive within a system marked by structural violence, social exclusion, and institutional corruption. Disability is an intrinsic part of the depiction of marginalization. El Marginal presents a range of disabled characters, including (semi)blind, dwarf, obese, and wheelchair-using prisoners. These figures exist within a hostile environment where vulnerability is exploited, reinforcing the systemic dehumanization they endure. El Marginal shows how cultural representations of disability influence social perceptions of marginalized bodies, confronting hegemonic narratives and discourses related to power, victimization, and mockery.
In the closing paper “Transactional Empowerment: Disability, Capitalism, and the Defamiliarization of Normalcy in Namib (South Korea, 2024-25),” Dasom Han examines the problematic portrayal of disability in a series centering on a mother-son relationship following the son’s hearing loss. While Namib empowers the son as independent, it reinforces conventional narratives that frame disability through economic privilege. The protagonist grapples with guilt over her son’s deafness and seeks redemption by purchasing a company for him. The son gradually asserts agency—though his empowerment is facilitated by monetary leverage. This commodification of care introduces a transactional perspective on responsibility, suggesting that independence stems from financial capability rather than social or structural change. Drawing on Nancy Fraser’s concept of recognition and redistribution, Han argues that while the series offers a portrayal of a confident disabled character, it normalizes a capitalist logic where empowerment is contingent on wealth, rather than inclusivity or systemic reform.
Probing recent film and TV series’ understanding of disability, these papers share a commitment to make sense of contemporary media’s reframing of “normalcy,” parsing the works’ political implications. They demonstrate how cinematography and technical elements enhance challenges to normalcy and a rethinking of disability, but also, how these representations fall back on ableism and stereotypes.