Chapter 6 Disability, Gender, and Innocence: Russ Meyer’s Mudhoney and Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and Problems of Signification in Cinema
In: Disability and Dissensus: Strategies of Disability Representation and Inclusion in Contemporary CultureSearch for other papers by Murray K. Simpson in
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Abstract
In his chapter, Murray K. Simpson argues that studies of disability in cinema often tend to focus on negative imagery, connecting impairment with undesirable moral or other character traits that are intended to induce the disapprobation or pity of the audience. These ‘representational’ approaches never bring a semiotic approach to the analysis of how corporeal variation functions in an overall economy of signification, intersecting with elements such as gender, class, race, the mise-en-scène and direction. In this chapter, three characters with disabilities, from two films by notorious ‘exploitation’ director, Russ Meyer, are considered – Mudhoney and Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!. By situating them in the overall context of the films, the complex interaction of impairment – deafness, intellectual disability and paraplegia – with sexuality, gender and morality reveals the impossibility of trying to isolate disability as a discrete element. The analysis demonstrates that taking ‘representation,’ rather than ‘signification,’ as the key analytic concept, creates ambiguities and contradictions that are avoided with an alternative, more semiotically informed, approach.