ABSTRACT
Basilisk stages an alternative image and narrative by celebrating a disabled woman confident in her own skin. It becomes part of a new genre of representations of empowered and embodied disabled characters on television, such as in the reality show about a group of paraplegic female friends, Push Girls, and in the film The Sessions. Basilisk stages Gaza as a confident, sexual agent as well as a political agent. During one scene of Wes’s psychotic break downs in Basilisk, the viewer sees a montage of images drawn from art history that show bodies with various amputations, some of which include disabled bodies and others that are fragmented sculpture. Basilisk, shows a disabled woman as a sexual being in affairs with both men and women, yet unlike Gaza, Frida is forever devoted to and often hurt by her philandering husband, Diego Rivera.
