ABSTRACT
With the release of Netflix's short television series, Special, starring 32-year-old Ryan O'Connell, an openly gay man with cerebral palsy, there are new opportunities to analyze taken-for-granted representations of disabled and queer identities within television media. Using queer theory and critical disability studies, this chapter aims to deconstruct visual representations of disability and sexuality within Netflix's Special, to bring to surface new understandings of disabled queer characters in television media, with the intent of “cripping” normative ideas of gay representation in media. This chapter considers Special an opportunity to engage with the hermeneutics of disability (Titchkosky, 2007), as well as normative representations of queer sexualities and compulsory able-bodiedness. By deconstructing how Special seeks to interrupt ideas of gay normalcy that construct normative gay bodies in tandem with compulsory able-bodiedness, this chapter offers a reading of Special that challenges interpretations of disability as lack while looking for the wonder and potential in cultural and media representations of disability.
