Event Title
Avatar: Opening Pandora's Box to a Post Human Future
Location
Goldstein Student Center
Event Website
http://crippingthecon.com/
Start Date
11-4-2013 10:30 AM
End Date
11-4-2013 12:00 PM
Description
American discourse about disability and impairment is based on assumptions of what disability is. Challenging these assumptions is among the goals of disability studies. This thesis first explores the construction of presumed defect in images of disability in the 2009 sci-fi fantasy Avatar, written and directed by James Cameron. In the narrative, Jake Sully chooses to abandon his human paraplegic body to become an able-bodied Na’vi. This erasure of disability is what Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell theorize as narrative prosthesis. Thus, Pandora’s box is opened to a problematic strategy of eliminating presumed defect rather than undermining the presumption.
Avatar: Opening Pandora's Box to a Post Human Future
Goldstein Student Center
American discourse about disability and impairment is based on assumptions of what disability is. Challenging these assumptions is among the goals of disability studies. This thesis first explores the construction of presumed defect in images of disability in the 2009 sci-fi fantasy Avatar, written and directed by James Cameron. In the narrative, Jake Sully chooses to abandon his human paraplegic body to become an able-bodied Na’vi. This erasure of disability is what Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell theorize as narrative prosthesis. Thus, Pandora’s box is opened to a problematic strategy of eliminating presumed defect rather than undermining the presumption.
https://surface.syr.edu/bts_conf/2013/Presentations/15
Comments
Full presentation will be available in August 2013.