First Steps

This paper examines the development of my thesis documentary film, First Steps, which portrays my experiences with a progressive disability, and situates my work in relation to different theoretical approaches to the representation of disability in film. The normative western construction of disability derives from legal, scientific, and medical models that tend to focus on repairing the handicap or curing the underlying physiological illness. This model of representing disability figures prominently in mainstream American film, and I discuss a number of the prevailing cinematic stereotypes about disability to expose how film helps to shape social perceptions about disability. I will consider these dominant discourses alongside alternative humanistic and socio-political discussions found in critical disability studies to consider how both discourses produce expressive possibilities, but also have their own limitations. Working through these different theoretical approaches in relation to the history of American film, I will explain how my own documentary negotiates both models of disability in an effort to find a balance between them and produce an authentic narrative of how I have experienced the onset of multiple sclerosis.