ABSTRACT
This chapter examines representations of women with physical disabilities on Saturday Night Live. Previous scholarship on this topic has found disabled women figures in popular culture to be represented through a trope of otherness that situates their bodies as incomplete, defective, and lacking value and reinforces their corporeal differences and deviances. My study is situated within the field of critical disability studies to offer further insights into how disabled women characters represent portrayals of resistance that go against normative culture to define their bodies on their own terms. Although the trope of otherness is employed in these sketches in ways that ridicule and shame the bodies of disabled women characters, I argue that to the contrary these characters' bodies provide a means by which they can transgress the normative ideals of the beauty myth in particular. My argument centers on how these characters challenge the normative definition of “physical disability as bodily inadequacy,” as described by Garland-Thomson. I argue that these characters exhibit corporeal deviance by utilizing the spectacle that is created by their disability(s) to subvert cultural standards of beauty and, at times, transform the shame that is placed upon their bodies. In doing so, these women characters enact agency by constructing their female disabled bodies as capable, desirable, and sexual.
