The Intersection of Gender and Disability in Bahram Tavakoli’s Here Without Me and Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie

This article examines the intersection of gender and disability in The Glass Menagerie, a 1944 play by the acclaimed American dramatist Tennessee Williams, and the 2010 Iranian film adaptation Here Without Me, scripted and directed by Bahram Tavakoli. Disability studies refer to a relatively new discipline which seeks to investigate the variegated continuum of embodiment through cultural discourses that challenge the medical and scientific perceptions of disability. In the adapted film, compulsory able-bodiedness, the belief that perfect healthy bodies are the norm, while freakish, different, and disabled ones are deviations from the said norm, is seen on the screen countless times, a view established by the dominant culture of normalcy. As a site of intercultural transposition, the film re-contextualizes the intersection of gender and disability in contemporary Iran and hence throws some of the tacit assumptions regarding embodied experience into relief. Both the play and the film implicate fantasy as an implicit critique of normalcy.