Ableism In Disney? What Is Disney And Pixar Movies Portraying As A Message To People
As we know that it should come to no surprise whatsoever that we live in a world where society, movies and
messages on bulletin telling or sharing with us that we should be living in a world where it is highly catered
and meeting the needs of able-bodied. More than that, people with disabilities are so often underrepresented in the media, TV, literature, and film.
People with disabilities are habitually only cast if their disability serves to explain some tragic backstory or denote a questionable morality.
Contrary to popular belief, disability studies and educational reform have become a major priority in the literary, critical, medical, and political world.
Just recently in 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed to give civil rights to people with disabilities.
This shows how oblivious many were to the severity of disabilities in society before this time, and also how people with disabilities have been
ostracized and abused through out centuries. Popular theorists such as Ronald J. Berger and Lennard J. Davis introduce terminology
and views on how to better understand disabilities. According to Berger, “disability studies- an interdisciplinary field of inquiry that includes representation
from social sciences, the humanities, and the medical, rehabilitation, and education professions- is vital to an understanding of humankind”
(Berger, Introducing Disability studies. 2013). Berger is definitely opening the doors and helping those with disabilities find their place in society.
Davis, on the other hand, focuses on the “construction of normalcy” saying, “the problem is not the person with disabilities; the problem is the way normalcy
is constructed to create the problem of the disabled person” (Davis, The Disability Studies Reader. 2006). Basically, society gets to label what is normal
and what is not. I was terrified of the evil grasshopper from A Bug’s Life but what does
that say about me or about how Disney portrays some animals as able bodied and good and the ones that are missing a language as savage and evil?
Or more importantly, what does this say about us as people (particularly those privileged as being seen as able-bodied and “normal”) that we often do not question or notice inequalities and illusions to slavery within our imaged utopias and cartoon wonderlands that we watch and admire while we were young!
On top of the more obvious examples, there seems to be an underlying theme of dehumanization of certain characters/groups of characters in Disney films and TV.
Here, I will look at how Disney portrays disabilities and the treatment the characters receive.
The first Disney movie I would like to Discuss is Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. All of the seven dwarfs have some kind of disability on top of having a
growth impairment. The two main dwarfs are Dopey and Doc. Doc is the leader amongst the seven and suffers a speech impediment, having trouble pronouncing words correctly and often stuttering. He is also slightly bigger than the other dwarfs which makes the others look weaker. Doc’s disabilities are a perfect representation of Berger’s ableism-“assumes that some people (and bodies) are normal and superior while other people are abnormal and inferior”
(Berger, Introducing Disability studies. 2013). Due to Doc’s condition he was the most able dwarf and all the other dwarfs were secondary to him.
Disney’s representation of Doc shows that disabilities like or similar to his makes all the others lesser and more reliable to the “normal” or “most normal” person. On the other hand, Dopey is the complete opposite of Doc and ableism. Dopey’s disability would put him in the intellectual disability category.
Intellectual disability is significant limitations intellectual functioning and adaptive behavior, which covers many everyday social and practical skills,
this is also the term now used for mental retardation. Dopey shows signs of this disabilities by not being able to talk and his child like behavior.
Dopey also seems to be very clumsy, tripping over everything and trying to mimic the other dwarfs through out their daily routines.
Disney, clearly depicts Dopey as a disabled person by making him the weakest dwarf and also with the name he was given.
For that matter, all of the dwarfs in Snow White have some sort of difference in functioning that allows them to live with Snow White in a non-sexualized way.
In particular, Doc and Dopey are both dwarfs that have prominent roles in the film. Doc, the head dwarf of the seven,
has a speech impediment. He has trouble with most of his verbal communication—stuttering on his words that often do not sound comprehensible. Throughout the film, Doc has to correct his words— when saying “hen” he corrects it to mean “men” and again saying “lapel diflings” when meaning apple dumplings. It is nice to see that even with this speech difficulty Doc still can remain the head of this group of dwa
