ABSTRACT
Disability evokes a gamut of discrete and non-discrete emotions in an ableist landscape. The first interaction between the disabled and non-disabled is a stare coming from a vantage point of a non-disabled person who has internalized ableism all their life. Staring as an act is triggered by the sight of someone who stands out as different and challenges the status quo by its mere existence. Taking cues from Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s conceptualization of staring, the chapter will examine the intense visual engagement between a non-disabled and a disabled, giving rise to a circuit of communication and meaning-making between them. The chapter will explore how a mere staring encounter could help us to locate and retrospect the fundamental question of what is a normative body and how it comes into being. The chapter will problematize the effect of a disabled body in an able-bodied ‘normative’ landscape, thus probing into the categories of normal and abnormal. Through examples from Hindi cinema, the aversive emotions that populate the non-disabled imaginary will be investigated. This study will also look into fear, pity, and disgust as the defining emotions that drive the imagination that goes into creating a disabled character.
