Writing Celebrity as Disability: Las Meninas, Performing Dwarfs, and Michael Jackson Fan Day

ABSTRACT

What are the ramifications of human beings transmogrified, by the stigma of disability or celebrity, into objects of cultural fascination, and how can we begin to define the consequences of this process for both the human object and the culture doing the objectifying? This article seeks to compare the experience of performing dwarfs as objects to be stared at, played with, and further miniaturised in the eyes of the public, with the contemporary treatment of Hollywood celebrities as abstract, dehumanised figures. I pair life writing in the form of memoirs (from Józef Boruwłaski and Michael Jackson) and portraiture (examining Velázquez’s iconic painting Las Meninas) with critical work on celebrity and disability by Graeme Turner, Tobin Siebers and others in an attempt to both illuminate the mechanisms by which celebrities are distorted by the process of public consumption and explore the consequences of this distortion on the wider culture. The preoccupation with the body by disability scholars helps ground our conceptualisations of both the famous dwarf and the contemporary celebrity, and the life writings of an historical court dwarf and a twentieth-century celebrity provide a window into the self-conscious identity construction required of ‘special’ figures.

KEYWORDS:

• Celebrity studies
• memoir
• disability studies
• Michael Jackson

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Eva Sage Gordon holds an MFA in Fiction Writing, an MA English, and is currently a PhD candidate in English at The Graduate Center, CUNY in New York City. Her research interests include life writing, celebrity studies, and American studies. Reach her on Twitter @EvaSageGordon1.

Notes

1 Certainly there are significant differences between the two groups: in one case, the othering aspect is physical, genetic, unstoppable, while in the other it is something done, some behaviour or set of behaviours leading to wide public exposure.

2 In ‘What is Disability Studies?’ Simi Linton writes of ‘bodies in space’ (2005, 518), while Tobin Siebers refers to the ‘disability aesthetic’ as that which ‘tracks the emotions that some bodies feel in the presence of other bodies’ (2005, 242).

3 Lindsey Row-Heyveld writes: ‘As disability scholarship has proven, the nonstandard body in literature is never allowed to be simply a fact but always serves as a sign of some deeper meaning that requires interpretation. This was particularly true in the early modern era, where disability could be read theologically, as a sign of God’s wrath or as a wonder that indicated the powers of nature; physiognomically, as a physical indicator of spiritual corruption, or, in reverse, as a nearly sacramental outward sign of inward graces; or humorally, as the corporeal result of “excess” or “lack,” both physical and moral’ (2013; 78).

4 See Chang 1986; Altmann 2013; Millner Kahr 1975; Alpers 1983.

5 As Barbara Benedict writes, ‘Boruwłaski’s memoirs, written to raise money, record his struggle to reshape the public identity accorded him by his status and stature into a self-definition stressing his sensibility, independence, and manners’ (2006, 79).

6 Coined by Horton and Wohl (1956), the term ‘para-social interaction’ has, in the context of celebrity studies, been theorised by Rojek (2001, 2015) and Hills (2015), to name only a few.

7 In this context, see the work of Richard Dyer (1986) and P. David Marshall (1997) on the ideological power of celebrity, which lies in its centrality to meaning-making processes and its integrative function through the construction of social and cultural identities.