The Fantasy Of „Manly” Disability. Atypical Embodiments Of Alternative Masculinities In Contemporary Popular Visual Culture

Abstract

This essay explores representations of the disabled male body in today’s popular visual media. Its focus is on whether and how the ”potently vulnerable” embodiments cherished by normative fan communities’ fantasies can personify alternative masculinities that reject hegemonic gender hierarchies. The ultimate concern is to see if they allow for a greater degree of imaginative, erotic agency for female spectators. These masculinites are specific in that they let male viewers intimately relate to a non-domineering, imperfectly re-embodied, demythologized mode of manliness. The complex negotiation of naturalized interconnections of engendered and dis/abled bodily identities along with daring associations of virility with weakness and vulnerability coincides with an attempt to undo oppressive patriarchal power relations. However, the examples – primarily taken from the popular television series House M.D., The Big Bang Theory, Game of Thrones and the related fan(fictional) reactions to each of these programs – also demonstrate that the deviation from the normative bodily ideal is only possible within the relative frames of the ideological regime of ableism.