American disability theatre thematizes disability identity, experience, and culture, focusing especially on the notion of disability as minority identity--not as disease or sin. Since discussions on disability theatre have not paid much attention to ...
American disability theatre thematizes disability identity, experience, and culture, focusing especially on the notion of disability as minority identity--not as disease or sin. Since discussions on disability theatre have not paid much attention to black and ethnic groups among the disabled population, my study explores disability identity politics manifested in the intersection of disability, race, and ethnicity in order, first of all, to resist the dominant white discourse of disability and then, to show the possibility of the politics of diversity which is the single most important aspect of the discourse of disability. I especially examine Susan Nussbaum's No One as Nasty, Cherrie Moraga's Heroes and Saints, and Lynn Manning's Weights to show that intersectional identities are integral parts of recent disability drama. Nussbaum's play dramatizes the dynamic between white disabled woman in a wheel chair and her African-American personal assistant; Heroes and Saints deals with a Hispanic woman who has only half a body; and Weights portrays a black man who loses sight in as the result of a gunshot wound. All these plays show double, triple, or interdependent identities, mixing race, ethnicity, gender, and disability, and as a result, the spectator "has a difficult time reducing the story to the dominant narrative of disability"--triumph over tragedy. Disable bodies in these intersectionalities foreground the diversity of corporeality, the physicality of existence, and the performativity of identity, underpinning the idea that race, gender, disability are all narrative and ideological constructs, while at the same time presenting the particularities of the experience of the disabled characters. The result is that the audience experience these bodies as "both real and constructed." As real bodies they are politically important, while as social contructs they are variable and radically historical.