Able-Bodied Actors and Disability Drag: Why Disabled Roles are Only for Disabled Performers | Featur
Women were once prohibited from performing onstage. The female characters in Shakespeare's plays were, in their first incarnations, played by boys doing their best impressions of women—and continued to be until society deemed this offensive, self-defeating and absurd.
Black and Asian characters were once often played by white actors. In "Tea House of the August Moon", Marlon Brando plays a Japanese man, with his eyes pulled tight across his face and his skin colored yellow. Laurence Olivier was nominated for an Oscar for playing Othello in blackface. And Alec Guinness painted himself brown to play Prince Faisal in "Lawrence of Arabia".
Those actors observed black people and Asian people, and they tried to walk like them and talk like them. They used make-up and prosthetics to imitate their physical characteristics, and took roles that would have been better played by black or Asian actors, two groups for which opportunities were already disproportionately limited. Today, just the idea of this is distasteful to us.
But able-bodied actors do all these things in efforts to imitate disabled people, and we do not protest. We are conditioned to be outraged when we see race being exploited onscreen. When we see disability being exploited onscreen, we are conditioned to applaud.
Just as non-white roles were once prized by white actors looking to show off their range, disabled roles are similarly prized by able-bodied actors today. A hundred articles and a thousand jokes have been written about how pretending to be disabled is a shortcut to an Oscar. For Hollywood stars, imitating disabled people in an effort to make able-bodied audiences think "Wow! I really believed he was one of them!" is a route to legitimacy as a serious actor.
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