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Popcorn Disabilities

The Highs and Lows of Disabled Representation in the Movies

Popcorn Disabilities cover

Popcorn Disabilities

The Highs and Lows of Disabled Representation in the Movies

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Pre-order. Available 27 Nov 2025
£17.99 RRP £22.49 Website price saving £4.50 (20%)

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Description

You can learn a lot from the movies-about sex and relationships, about business, about history. Sure, there's a fair amount of fantasy, wish fulfillment, and glorious hair to exaggerate everything, but for better or for worse, films remain one of the most important ways that viewers around the world learn about other people and cultures. And almost since the dawn of the medium, movies have shaped the public's understanding of and assumptions about disability.

As a film critic and disabled person, Kristen Lopez speaks with particular authority on how disability is represented-and too often misrepresented-in movies. Popcorn Disabilities is her impassioned but nonetheless fun and engaging survey of how Hollywood has dealt with disability over the last century. As she reveals, even when they're not just narrative props to help out an able-bodied protagonist, disabled movie characters are overwhelmingly white, affluent, and conventionally attractive, obscuring the variety of disabilities and the experiences of those who deal with them. But she also explains where films have gotten it right and how the power of the medium can continue to be used to enlighten and educate in the future. From little-remembered gems like Tod Browning's Freaks-one of the earliest well-intentioned attempts to show disabled characters as complex, three-dimensional human beings-to contemporary films like Coda, My Left Foot, A Different Man, and many others, it challenges popular assumptions about disability while never losing sight of movies' unique power, influence, and potential as a tool for social good.

Table of Contents

Foreword by Ben Mankiewicz

Introduction: Surprise! Your Disability is Now a Movie

1. Silent Saints and Tragic Monsters

2. “One of Us"

3. Disabled Actors: An All-Too Brief History Lesson

4. War and the Rise of the Bitter Cripple

5. “You Never Go Full Retard”

6. Black and Disabled

7. Disabled Horror and the Horror of Disability

8. Pretty Disabilities

9. Caretaker Cinema

10. Cripping Up and the Oscar Myth

Epilogue: Are We There Yet?

Product details

Bloomsbury Academic Test
Published 27 Nov 2025
Format Ebook (PDF)
Edition 1st
Extent 240
ISBN 9798765161272
Imprint Bloomsbury Academic
Illustrations 15 BW Photos
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

Author

Kristen Lopez

Kristen Lopez is a pop culture essayist, critic, a…

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