Keynotes

Susan Antebi

Colliding Frames: Disability Performance and Televisual Comedy in Mexican and Global Media
This presentation seeks to complicate approaches to the nexus of humor and human differences, by paying attention to historical and contemporary juxtapositions of live and filmed disability performance. First, I consider specific moments in the historical transition between live performance and cinema in which disability is central to engagement with the audience, not primarily as the object of an offensive joke or of a voyeuristic gaze, but rather as a condition that makes the framing of the spectacle possible. Second, I turn to contemporary manifestations of disability in filmed stand-up comedy, such as in the Netflix series Ojitos de huevo/Nothing to See Here, featuring the blind Mexican comedian Alexis Arroyo. The interface between film and live disability performance, both in early cinema and in contemporary stand-up, highlights the irony or humor inherent in the juxtaposition of divergent framings of disability, oscillating between performer and spectator, pathos and comedy.

Bionote
Susan Antebi is a Professor of Latin American Literature in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on disability and corporeality in the contexts of contemporary and twentieth-century Mexican cultural production. She is the author of Embodied Archive: Disability in Post-Revolutionary Mexican Cultural Production (University of Michigan Press, Winner of the 2021 Tobin Siebers prize and of the 2022 LASA Mexico Section Prize for the best book in the humanities) and a previous monograph, Carnal Inscriptions: Spanish American Narratives of Corporeal Difference and Disability (Palgrave-Macmillan 2009). Her co-edited volumes include Libre Acceso: Latin American Literature and Film through Disability Studies, with Beth Jörgensen (SUNY, 2016); and The Matter of Disability: Materiality, Biopolitics, Crip Affect, with David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder (University of Michigan Press, 2019). Current research projects centre on eugenic legacies in contemporary Mexico and the Americas, and on magical thinking and disability sensoria in literature and spectacle.

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Claudia Gottwald

Ableismus und die Macht des Lachens – eine kritische Perspektive am Beispiel des Diskurses um Luke Mockridge
Der Beitrag untersucht die Grenzen des Humors im Kontext von Ableismus und gesellschaftlicher Machtverhältnisse anhand der Kontroverse um Luke Mockridge. Im Zentrum steht die Frage, inwiefern Witze über behinderte Menschen als diskriminierende Praxis kritisiert werden sollten. Während sich marginalisierte Gruppen häufig humoristisch mit eigenen Erfahrungen auseinandersetzen, birgt die Aneignung dieses Humors durch nichtbehinderte Personen das Risiko, Machtasymmetrien zu reproduzieren. Theoretische Konzepte wie „reaktionärer Humor“ (Sperk), „charged humor“ (Krefting) und internalisierter Ableismus dienen als Analyserahmen, um die gesellschaftliche Funktion von Comedy zwischen Machterhalt und Emanzipation zu reflektieren. Die Debatte um Mockridge verdeutlicht, dass gesellschaftliche Sensibilisierungsprozesse notwendig sind, um diskriminierende Muster in der Comedy-Kultur zu hinterfragen.

Bionote
Claudia Gottwald ist als Oberstudienrätin im Hochschuldienst in der Fakultät Rehabilitationswissenschaften an der TU Dortmund tätig. Sie beschäftigt sich in Forschung und Lehre mit kulturwissenschaftlichen und ethischen Fragen. 2008 promovierte sie zum Thema Lachen über das Andere – eine historische Analyse komischer Repräsentationen von Behinderung (transcript) und hat seitdem zahlreiche Artikel in diesem Feld veröffentlicht, u.a. „Ist Behinderung komisch?: Lachen über verkörperte Differenz im historischen Wandel“. In Elsbeth Bösl, Anne Klein & Anne Waldschmidt (Hrsg.), Disability History, Bielefeld: transcript, 2010, 231–252; „Einen Witz machen, statt einer zu sein“. Curaviva 7/8 (2011), 40–42; „Behinderung in der Karikatur: zum Verhältnis von Hässlichkeit, Komik und Behinderung in der Geschichte der Karikatur“. In Beate Ochsner & Anna Grebe (Hrsg.): Andere Bilder. Zur Produktion von Behinderung in der visuellen Kultur, Bielefeld: transcript, 2013, 117-132.

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Petra Kuppers

Thin Lines: Sarcasm and Disability Art
In this keynote, Petra Kuppers engages with one of the most delicious and yet hard to capture aspects of disability culture practices: sarcasm and its traces, in particular in the film work of the Disabled Avant-Garde (British duo Katherine Araniello & Aaron Williamson). How can we talk about art that takes the piss, that posits in-crowds and punters, that uses community arts and performance art tropes to undermine the foundations these forms depend upon? Audiences (often students in disability arts and culture classes) cringe, unsure of how to react, what is permissible to laugh about, and what is beyond the pale. In tracing this lineage of disability and community performance, Kuppers looks at the various audiencing procedures of disability media productions.

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Petra Kuppers (she/her), MA Germanistik Köln, MA Film and TV Warwick, UK, PhD Falmouth College of Arts, UK. She is a disability culture activist and a community performance artist. She grounds herself in disability culture methods and uses somatics, performance, media work, and speculative writing to engage audiences towards more socially just and enjoyable futures. Her latest academic study is the award-winning Eco Soma: Pain and Joy in Speculative Performance Encounters (University of Minnesota Press, 2022, open access). She is German, lives in the US, and is a Professor of Performance Studies and Disability Culture at the University of Michigan. She was a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow. She is currently at work on Planting Disabled Futures, a virtual reality/community performance project, as a Just Tech Fellow (2024–2026).

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Tom Shakespeare

Laughing at or laughing with? When it’s okay to find disability funny
In this talk, I want to reflect on three things. First, 58 years of being disabled, meaning a long history of funny failures as a disabled person, and thousands of connections facilitated by humour. Second, ten years of stage performance as a disability arts compere  and comedian. Third, decades of trying to write funny novels with disabled characters, most recently The Ha-ha (2024) and The Ends (2025).

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Tom is Professor of Disability Research at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. His academic books include The Sexual Politics of Disability (1986) and Disability Rights and Wrongs (2006). He has broadcast widely on BBC Radio.

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Alison Wilde

“Anything Can Happen”: On Comedy, Inspiration Porn, Talent, Meritocracy, and Role Models
This year, a disabled (blind) comedian, Chris McCausland, won the Strictly Come Dancing competition, a show which is close to the heart of idealised perceptions of Britishness, and the role of the BBC in the national imaginary. Examining his growing popularity on the show, I will explore the wider relationships of disability to comedy, arguing that it was his humour, and specifically his wit which increased his “likeability” (Sancho), and led to his popularity.
I will argue that his success, and the central role of comedy and humour within this, illuminate some significant dilemmas of disability representation, whilst informing us further of the relationships disabled people have to comedy. I will show some of the ways in which he (and others) challenged meritocratic discourses and the art form as a whole, effectively queering the normativities inherent within judgements of good art and talent. In doing so, I will demonstrate how humour can and has been used to challenge inspiration porn, whilst identifying some of the limitations to new forms of representation. I will also show the resistances of the show, and the roles of humour in rearticulating or shifting cultural forms which tend to reinscribe inclusion as “abnormality from which normality makes itself” (Siebers).
Finally, drawing on my exploration of the show’s and audience’s responses and disputes, as well as wider cultural trends, featuring discourses of sympathy, ability, wokeness, and unfairness, I will analyse the conditions of possibility for the role of comedy in enabling disabled people to move away from tragic and sentimental or inspiration-based portrayals, to be included in media genres which continue to place talent and assumptions of non-disabled bodies as central values, despite moves towards inclusion.

References
Sancho, Jane. Disabling Prejudice: Attitudes Towards Disability and Its Portrayal on Television. British Broadcasting Corporation, the Broadcasting Standards Commission and the Independent Television Commission. 2003. Web. http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/guidelines/editorialguidelines/research/disabling-prejudice.pdf.
Siebers, Tobin. Disability Aesthetics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010.

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Alison Wilde is an Assistant Professor in Sociology and Criminology at Northumbria University. She has researched and written mainly on topics of screen media, communications, disability, audiences, working-class and disabled academics, educational inclusion, parenting, gender, and social and health care. She co-founded the MeCCSA Disability Studies Network, and the BSA’s Disability Studies Group and has worked on the editorial boards of several journals.