Beautiful minds and unruly bodies: embodiment and academic identity in Still Alice and The Theory of Everything

ABSTRACT

This article explores the representation of disability and academic identity in two award-winning films: Still Alice and The Theory of Everything. Drawing on scholarship about embodiment and the ‘normal professor body’, I demonstrate how the complex images of disabled academics in these films take up and replicate (to differing extents) dominant discourses of disembodied intellectualism that shape conceptions of the professoriate. As examples of public pedagogy, these representations have significant ramifications for popular understandings of disability and higher education.

KEYWORDS:

• Academic identity
• disability
• embodiment
• film
• public pedagogy

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Katelyn Johnstone and Varun Puri for their collaboration on earlier stages of this research and their feedback on this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Elizabeth Marquis http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7362-678X