Disability and Its Intersection with Race and Class in Arthur Hiller’s Movie See No Evil, Hear No Evil (1989)

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Date

2019-09

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

Université Mouloud Mammeri Tizi Ouzou

Abstract

This dissertation deals with disability and its intersection with race and class in Arthur Hiller’s movie See No Evil, Hear No Evil (1989). It is, therefore, about the disability, class and race minorities. To accomplish our study, we relied on Sally Chivers and Nicole Marcotic’s introduction to their edited book entitled Problem Body: Projecting Disability in Film as a theoretical basis for our work where they highlight how disability is portrayed in films. We have also relied on some borrowed ideas from the entire book especially from its two chapters entitled “Body Genres: An anatomy of Disability in Film” and “No Life Anyway: Pathologizing Disability in Film”, Kimberlee Crenshaw’s notion of intersectionality introduced in her paper “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics” and Tobin Siebers’s “Disability and the Theory of Complex Embodiment—For Identity Politics in a New Register”. We have studied three major ideas. First, we studied how the disabled are associated with “Otherness” and marginalized as a minority group in See No Evil, Hear No Evil. This was highlighted by the two characters David Lyons and Wallas Kerew as they both have disabilities. Second, we studied the manner the two characters attempt to “demarginalize” and integrate themselves into society. Third, we focused on the analysis of the representation of disability’s intersectionwith race and class in the movie and how these three issues interact in the case of the two main characters. The movie sheds light on the shared conditions that people with disabilities and those belonging toa specific ethnic group or social class live in as they are excluded from society.

Description

30cm ; 54p.

Keywords

Disability, race, class, intersectionality, Arthur Hiller.

Citation

Literature and Civilization