ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the contemporary performance from within disability culture that has been documented and explored by other disability studies scholars. Certainly the avoidance of disability in the study of mainstream theater finds its genesis at least partially in the construction of the academy. Drama also interrogates other cultural locations of disability besides the medical. Mainstream drama has shown how disability is deeply intertwined with other identities in ways that creates coalition among identities. The fabulous has complex, sometimes divergent meanings; it can be the extraordinary or prodigious, or it can be that which strains credulity. The fabulous invalid, then, simultaneously exposes the contradictions of performed embodiment and acknowledges lived embodiment. Drama has also explored in unexpected ways what Sharon Snyder and David T. Mitchell have termed the cultural locations of disability, examining how different institutions or structures shape our ideas about disability.
