ABSTRACT
At the 2006 Academy Awards, Brokeback Mountain took home three Oscars and the independent film Murderball, which chronicled the lives of a group of quadriplegic rugby players, was nominated for best documentary feature. The aesthetic elevation of these two particular films reveals much about how contemporary cultural anxieties regarding queerness and physical disability are negotiated through visual culture. It’s not uncommon, of course, to see films that deal with disability and homosexuality at the Oscars. What was out of the ordinary, however, was the extent to which Murderball and Brokeback Mountain each harnessed the normalizing powers of masculinity, presenting a narrative of gender that helped to generate mainstream appeal in the box office and, more importantly, mainstream approval of a stigmatized social identity. In these narratives, disability and queer sexuality are not just shown to be compatible with masculinity; they are, more fundamentally, celebrated as the logical extension of masculinity’s excess. But the emphasis on masculinity that these two films share is also the source of their antagonism. Indeed, a close reading of these two films exposes masculinity as the visual mechanism through which
disability and homosexuality distance themselves from one another, each identity to some extent disciplining the other. Such mutual regulation, however, is not arbitrary and I will argue that it is precisely the various historical linkages between queerness and disability-their continual status as uneasy bedfellows-that bring us to this reactionary cultural moment where ablebodiedness is queered and heterosexuality is defiantly “cripped.”
