“Disruptive Energies”

Oakley, Catherine

doi:https://doi.org/10.3828/jlcds.2015.24

Electrotherapy and Early Fiction Films in Europe and America, 1907–1911

Oakley, Catherine

Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies (2015), 9, (3), 295–312.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3828/jlcds.2015.24
Language: English
Pages: 18

Abstract

This article analyzes a selection of short silent fiction films released by European and American companies between 1907 and 1911 that feature the application of electricity to the body in a variety of contexts. It reads the visual trope of the electrified body in relation to institutional formations of physical ability and social utility implicit in contemporary medico-commercial electrotherapeutic treatments and the practices of scientific management. The argument is that these films depict electrified subjects characterized not by the passivity or incapacity of impairment, but by a vital excess energy that undermines symbolic authority and temporarily disrupts the social order. This cinema constitutes one form of early twentieth-century visual culture that registered, and resisted, the ableist logic underpinning capitalist growth. The commercial expansion of the cinema in both the US and the UK during this transitional period of early film-making made these alternative discursive formations of the human body newly visible to an emerging mass audience.

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