DANCING US TO HER SONG

Abstract

In cultural texts, disabled people often function as an emblematic screen upon which non-disabled people's fears and anxieties are projected, rather than functioning as three-dimensional characters or representing disabled people's own experiences. Dance Me to My Song (hereafter Dance), is a rare exception. The film's star and co-author of its script, Heather Rose Slattery, who had cerebral palsy, did not want her film to be pigeonholed as a ‘disability film’. Dance nevertheless demands that we reflect on normative and non-normative bodies and the politics of disability. In its exploration of the tensions between technology, embodiment, autonomy and intersubjectivity, Dance exceeds the (at times) utopian or programmatic accounts of cultural theory as well as the social model of disability. Reading the film only through the lens of ‘social realism’ and ‘disability’, however, limits the audience's depth of engagement with it. We argue that Dance, in its representation of romance, its use of time and its deployment of voice, should be resituated within the genre of the ‘women's film’. In co-writing and performing in such an audacious film, Rose has managed to simultaneously politicise desire, normalise disability and, all the while, dancing us to her song.

Notes

The authors are grateful to the anonymous reviewers and the guidance of Australian Feminist Studies. This paper's genesis lies in a chapter of Catherine's PhD thesis on women's filmmaking (Simpson 2000). With her expertise in disability theory and genre studies, Nicole breathed new life into it when they taught together at Macquarie University in 2007. Both authors have been carers for disabled family members and for that reason this paper is dedicated to the memory of Rory Stevenson (b. 2003, d. 2004) and John Simpson (b. 1930, d. 2003). May their memories live on through bold films such as Dance and may we always be mindful of our TAB status.

1. The phrase ‘temporarily able-bodied’ or ‘TAB’ refers to the fact that many people, who do not view themselves, and are not viewed, as disabled in youth or mid-life find themselves experiencing impairment and disablement during their lifecourse, and particularly in later life. As Mitchell and Snyder point out, the notion of ‘able-bodiedness’ is invested in a ‘mythical aura of perfectability’ (2001b, 386). These writers argue that the disabled body offers a ‘more appropriate paradigm of mutable humanity’ (2001b, 386). The language of ‘TAB’ as used by Duncan, Goggin, and Newell (2005) among others, highlights this human experience of mutability.

2. Jacques Lacan's pre-linguistic phase or mirror phase is a stage of human development in psychoanalytic theory. It refers to a time when the child is fully dependent and fully identifies with its mother, before language intervenes and the child perceives the separation between itself and its mother (Hayward 2006, 277).