ABSTRACT
Disability in China, as elsewhere, is often synonymous with marginality. The lives of socially marginalized characters – disabled people, prostitutes, and elderly homeless people – are invisible to most people in contemporary China. This chapter explores the way in which the documentary film Fortune Teller (Suanming 算命) demonstrates that physical/intellectual disability is only one reason for social invisibility and exclusion from the ‘civic’. When the filmmaker’s gaze turns to the lives of differently abled people, it can show how they represent ordinary ways of coping with challenges despite persistent exclusions and injustices. The film seeks to make visible the fact that the disabled share the same everyday concerns in life with the able-bodied, those of intimacy, family relationships, responsibilities. In many senses of the word, the disabled stumble along, but with dignity.
