From Cradle to Grave: The Life Cycle of the Disabled Female Body in Contemporary Francophone Literature and Cinema

I aim to expand on the research undertaken at undergraduate and masters level, interrogating the hegemonic structures (political, institutional, academic) in France which reinforce compulsory able-bodiedness, consigning disability to the margins and thus accounting for the dearth of disabled representation and voices.

There is a lamentable absence of the disabled perspective within discussion of marginality in cultural studies. Even more so, the lived experience of disabled women is woefully understudied and undertheorised, it is a topic around which there is persistent silence. I hope to change this.

This project seeks to illuminate the lived experience of physically disabled women, revealing their power, strength and worth. I intend to explore questions of embodiment, agency and love which exceed the patriarchal, paternalistic and medicalised models of valuing life.

Further, I have been struck by the lack of attention given to gendered, queer and racialised experiences of disability, so I would like to develop my research on the intersection of these phenomena. Attitudes towards and representations of disability vary from one country to another; I will work comparatively on Francophone texts produced both within and outside of France, to understand why this is the case and how this reflects societally embedded, normative preconceptions.