Cinemas of Isolation, Histories of Collectivity: Crip Camp and Disability Coalition

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Notes

1 Martin Norden’s The Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical Disability in the Movies (1994) offers a rigorous cataloging of disability “types” throughout the history of Hollywood. On disability in anthropology generally, see Shuttleworth (2004). And for an incisive anthropological and autobiographical examination of disability in the USA, see Murphy (1987).

2 I use the term “disabled people” here and throughout this essay rather than the term “people with disabilities” in a gesture toward the social model of disability. By using the term “disabled” I draw attention to the ways that disability is produced and imposed upon a body by the structures that impede and exclude it, rather than being an immutable truth contained within an individual body (as medical models and many popular narratives would do).

3 A lot of the footage in Crip Camp comes from personal archives, produced by campers and counselors. Vivian Sobchack’s work on the film-souvenir or home movie and its relationship to the documentary (1999) may be of interest here. Although the use of home video footage in documentary is not in the least unconventional, the relative dearth of such images makes them even more notable here.

4 The entwined history of eugenics and disabilities is far more extensive and complex than I can adequately describe here (Davis and Sanchez 2021 give a helpful introduction); but I use this term primarily to emphasize the degree to which many utopian visions of the future have by and large imagined and desired the eradication of disability rather than its integration into everyday life, an inherently eugenicist position. Christopher Bell’s work in Blackness and Disability (2012) also extends and clarifies the relationship between eugenics and disability in 19th- and 20th-century Western thought.