Gender Stereotypes With Disabilities In Film

Since the very first Academy Awards show in 1927, 16 percent of the Best Actor/ Actress winners have won their award by portraying a person with a disability. Up to this very day in the year 2018, Harold Russell has been the only actor with a physical disability that has won an Oscar. Russell was a WWII veteran; he lost both of his hands to an explosive in an army training. Articles from the LA Times, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post have written before about why able bodied actors are given the opportunity to act and not so many opportunities are given to the disabled community when twenty percent of the U.S population have some type of disability. The excuse given by economists such as Leaver say that, “Well – known actor’s presence

Gender and disability are commonly stigmatized as well. According to Benshoff and Griffin, “Women with disabilities (especially deafness or blindness) tend to be used cinematically to evoke sympathy and/ or victimization, whereas men with disabilities are more often linked to anger, violence, sagacity, and / or tragedy”. Again this label is placed in movies not only with disabilities but also with gender. There is this expectation that females with disabilities have to be sensitive and weak meanwhile men are expected to be angry and violent. As mentioned earlier the way disabilities have been portrayed throughout time it is the reason why there are so many negative aberrations that shouldn’t exist. It is one of the reasons why society in general has a hard time assimilating what normal is and who gets to be determined as normal. Stereotype and stigma both have always been an issue in the disabled community, as both terms go hand in hand. There is a rise of stereotype and stigma through the misunderstandings and misconceptions people make and it is through the way disabilities are portrayed in film that we feed such things. Graduate student of

By their results it’s clear that having a disability makes it difficult to find a job in the entertainment industry. It’s not that there is no clear existence of disabled actors in the market, there are; it’s just that they are not given the chance. Opposing views claim that casting is influenced by the name of the celebrity and that Hollywood companies make and sell films that they think people want to see. One can’t deny the influence celebrities have on the film market and that movies are about making money, however, Hollywood has a moral obligation with the public since they imply that they are a diverse society, inclusion of the disabled community in movies is necessary and people are changing their opinions in what they want to