Doing Disability Movies Differently

Abstract

The article reflects on one author’s participation in a project that explored the aesthetics of disability through the production of an accessible, open-access film about disability representation. It evaluates the potential for accessible creative texts produced by disabled media makers to serve as sites of critical, creative intervention. Written by the filmmaker (Muredda) and three researchers (Jones, Zbitnew, and Collins), this reflection draws from the principles of critical accessibility, as well as from scholarship on disability and aesthetics, to examine the intersection of disabled film criticism and textual production. It considers both the potential and the limitations of accessible productions about representation as a rejoinder to a representational tradition that has often implemented the figurative language of disability in functional and regressive ways, largely without input from disabled artists and spectators.