Disability and Personhood on Screen: An Autoethnographic Analysis of Million Dollar Baby, Gattaca, and Sound of Metal

Author

Patrick Seick, Southern Illinois University CarbondaleFollow

Date of Award

5-1-2025

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department

Communication Studies

First Advisor

Pensoneau-Conway, Sandy

Abstract

The phrase “disabled person” is deceptive as it assumes the self-evidence and immutability of those with disabilities’ access to personhood. Due to legal changes, technological advances, and evolving sociocultural norms, disabled people find themselves in a constant struggle to articulate and defend their existence and humanity. This dissertation begins with this acknowledgement and utilizes the pervasiveness of popular cultural to explore attitudes and representations of disability. In this dissertation, I explore how personhood and disability intersect. Specifically, I explore how texts of popular culture construct disability and then what those constructions mean for personhood. This analysis is responsive and contributive to extant, interdisciplinary scholarship that takes on these topics in a piecemeal and fractured way. This dissertation aims to bring together these two generative concepts – disability and personhood – to attend to the legal, social, and cultural landscapes that disabled people navigate and will navigate. To do so, I mobilize autoethnographic methods to analyze three cinematic texts: Million Dollar Baby, Gattaca, and Sound of Metal. This dissertation explores various conclusions. First, it explores the various logics, visual rhetorics, and rationales offered for the deaths of disabled characters within these films, with particular attention paid to the deployment of a curative framework of disability. Second, it offers a unique perspective on the embodiment of disabled life. Temporality is a critical tool to understand the tension explored between the life and death of disabled characters. Finally, the ways that disabled people and their bodies are marked as fundamentally different are particularized and named. The past and future of disabled bodies are undoubtedly fraught; writing about those bodies that are rendered on the screen only reinforces the tremendous implications wrought for those bodies off the screen.