Making autism through Ocean Heaven (海洋天堂, Haiyang tiantang) and the possibilities of realizing disability differently

Abstract

This article focuses on a filmic portrayal of issues relating to autism in a Chinese context, using this as a prism through which to consider how meanings associated with disability in general, and the autistic spectrum in particular, are produced. Instead of perpetuating a reductive positive/negative approach to representation, the article focuses on the fluid and dynamic ways in which author and audience co-produce texts relating to disability in ways which are invariably influenced by, and reproducing of, specific socio-cultural and discursive circumstances. Meaning-making in relation to disability is, however, ongoing and there is potential to realize disability differently.

Keywords:

• Autistic spectrum
• well-meaning representations
• text
• discourse
• manifest/latent content

Notes

1. Chinese cinema is used in a broad sense to refer to ‘Greater China’, namely Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao.

2. This film is a Mainland Chinese-Hong Kong drama, written and directed by a Mainland Chinese author who teaches at the Beijing Film Academy and starring a Hong Kong martial arts star and a Taiwanese actor. The film is set in Qingdao, Shandong Province, Mainland China. The film is 96 minutes in duration, and was released on 24 June 2010.

3. Xue stated this during an interview on the DVD of the film, as did Li who said: ‘I hope society will better understand that there is this group of parents and children. We, as members of this big “family” that is humankind, if we can help more, care more, encourage these parents and their children, they won’t feel detached or as though no one understands what they are going through. If everyone expresses a little bit more love and care, then they will have more courage to continue down this path’.

4. I am, however, aware – especially after re-reading my claims regarding the film in preparation for the publication of this article – that my reading is dystopian. This has prevented me from reading the fact that Dafu does seem to venture, temporarily, into ‘society’ at the end of the film after seeming to have grasped skills necessary to, for example, use public transport independently as a form of meaningful inclusion.

5. To fight this, Nichols notes that we must ‘remind writers that protagonists with a disability might remain disabled at the end of the story’ (2016, 115; original emphasis).

6. Rain Man 1988, directed by Barry Levinson; Temple Grandin 2010, directed by Mick Jackson; and Mary and Max 2009, directed by Adam Eliot.

7. 2008, directed by Elissa Down.

8. Autistic difference is, whether evident in spaces of everyday life or mediated representations, challenging because, as Murray explains, even ‘the most pronounced cases of autistic behavioural difference do not involve a continual visual signification of disability’ (2008, 104).

9. Mintz, meanwhile, suggests that social discourses about disability are not about disability at all. Rather, they relate to the need to guarantee the privileged status of the non-disabled citizen: ‘a need that, in turn, emerges from fears about the fragility and unpredictability of embodied identities’ (2002, 162 as quoted in Goodley 2012, 314).