A Certain Kind of Happiness: Women and Disability in Recent Hungarian Cinema

Abstract

The article examines cinematic representations of disabled women in recent Hungarian films and argues that women’s lived experiences and corporal realities are often overwritten by deeply gendered and heteronormative expectations. As a case in point, the close analysis focuses on a recent, award-winning Hungarian film by Ildikó Enyedi, On Body and Soul (2017) showing that the film ultimately reinforces traditional configurations of love and romance forgoing the narrative potentials that woman’s disabled subject initially opens up in the film. Similar to several recent Hungarian films, On Body and Soul, leaves the disabled female protagonist to her own devices (cinematic and otherwise) to cope with social pressures of patriarchal gender norms as well as with ‘compulsory able-mindedness’. More generally, the goal of the essay is to problematize the kinds of happiness accessible to disabled women and to critique some of the ways in which cinema constructs concepts of happiness for the disabled.

Keywords:

• Disability
• gender
• Hungarian cinema
• happiness

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 I chose to use the term ‘mental disability’ based on Margaret Price’s definition of the term, as it best reflects the congruence of ‘people for whom access to human interaction is problematic’ (340) and their right to visibility (cinematic and otherwise).

2 The diminutive ‘-ka’ adds the meaning ‘small’ to any word in Hungarian.

3 Enyedi’s cinema has been celebrated for its surrealist style, gender-sensitive themes and mythological proportions. Her debut film, My 20^th Century (1989) won the Camera D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1989 and was widely acknowledged as an example of contemporary feminist cinema in Eastern Europe.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lilla Tőke

Lilla Tőke is Associate Professor of English at CUNY, LaGuardia Community College where she teaches composition, literature, and film courses. She obtained her PhD from Stony Brook University in Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies. She also holds an MPhil degree in Gender Studies from the Central European University, Budapest. Her scholarship focuses on communist and Postcommunist cinema and gender theory.