While the discourse of disability in the media undergoes continual renegotiation, Hollywood has typically characterized disability in terms of lack or loss. The homogenization of a society that continues to glamorize beauty and health within prohibitively narrow limits does much to render disability as deficiency rather than as difference.

What disability studies of the past twenty years have argued is that public attitudes often present obstacles as significant as the physical limitations themselves. The disabled body conveys social and physical distinctions from what is considered normative and therefore less culturally attractive.

As David Mitchell puts it, 'the disabled body surfaces as any body capable of being narrated as 'outside the norm'' (17).

3Ĭultural distinctions of disability as abnormal or deviant persist within embodied formations of difference. It is my intention here to discuss both the ways that Taymor anchors subjectivity to the disabled body and canvasses the current media discourse of the disabled body. 2 Yet, in Taymor's rendering of Kahlo's subjectivity - the way she comes to knowledge about self, others, and the world - as difference, Taymor contests oppressive cultural definitions of disability. Insofar as Taymor's film renders disability thematically - living with disability informed much of Kahlo's artistry and biography - it participates in the ongoing trend to make a particular disability a primary plot device (sympathetic instances might include The Elephant Man, My Left Foot, and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly ). These critics failed to recognize the way Taymor's film reconceptualizes the disabled body in relation to subjectivity. While Paul Smith was reminded of more recent female artists 'who use their private lives and bodies as directly and vividly as Frida did in her work' (41), he nonetheless thought that Taymor was unable to translate this complexity in her film, particularly in the way the characters 'seem to speak to each other in headlines: 'The marriage of an elephant and a dove'' (42).

Katie Clifford wrote that the movie focused 'on the artist as a victim of circumstance rather than portraying her as an individual with agency' the artist's contribution to artistic and political discourse was omitted (61). 1 At the time Frida was released, the film received mixed reviews. Julie Taymor's biographical film Frida (2002), based on the life of the Mexican modernist painter, Frida Kahlo (1907-1954), interrogates the ways Kahlo's art was informed by her life experience.

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