An important aspect of critical study entails analyzing the notion of disability and its representation in literature, film, and popular media. That’s because oftentimes portrayals of disabled figures have the tendency to influence cultural perception of disabilities.

There are two modes of thinking about disability—the medical model and the social model.

The medical model stresses the need to fix disability as an attribute of a person. This model overemphasizes the medical institutions’ role in clinical intervention and overrides individual agency. This model tends to see disability as a defect, and it places the burden on the individual rather than on the society that fails to accommodate the person.

Conversely, the social model addresses disability as a state of being that is produced by the society at large. Buildings and normalized modes of interpersonal interactions are often designed around the notion of compulsory able-bodiedness—the idea that everyone, by default, should be physically and mentally capable of gaining the same level of access to resources. In this context, society imposes limitations on the people who have different needs. Disability is therefore socially produced, according to this model.

Impairment is not necessarily an obstacle and does not in and by itself constitute disability. It only becomes a form of disability when the environment and its design fail to support a person’s needs. Disability is a socially induced hindrance to mobility or to access.

Disability studies give us the tool to evaluate our collective and personal responses to neurodivergent and atypical life experiences. We examine the political and social factors responsible for producing or affecting people of all types of abilities. These factors include, but are not limited to cultural, economic, political and social elements.

Disability is also a mode of inclusive thinking that pays attention to what is assumed to be the “norm” and how we navigate physical and social spaces. With a disability theory lens, we will discover that many stories and films do touch on, if not elaborate upon, the figure of disability. In other words, disability studies concern both disabled figures as well as stories that do not feature such figures but rather emphasize able-bodiedness as the norm.