Together with Maxime Savoie, I had the opportunity to co-author a contribution to the special issue Disability Studies and Cinema: Invalidating the Gaze, edited by Romain Chareyron and Barbara Fougère and published in the journal Images Secondes.
Entitled “La fiction documentaire et l’expérience dans Kenny (1987) de Claude Gagnon : une autocritique intersectionnelle médiatique, sociale et sociétale” (Documentary Fiction and Lived Experience in Claude Gagnon’s Kenny (1987): A Media, Social, and Societal Intersectional Self-Critique), our article examines how Claude Gagnon’s film Kenny (1987) challenges conventional media representations of disability by avoiding stereotypical portrayals while foregrounding the social and familial pressures that shape the young protagonist’s lived experience. Through a reflexive cinematic approach, Gagnon exposes the normative frameworks imposed by society and invites viewers to reconsider the very notion of normality, while affirming the diversity of human experiences through a mise en abyme of the filmmaking process itself.
For further information about this issue of Images Secondes: https://imagessecondes.fr/index.php/06-2026-disability-studies/
Reference :
Jessica Ragazzini and Maxime Savoie, (2026), “La fiction documentaire et l’expérience dans Kenny (1987) de Claude Gagnon : une autocritique intersectionnelle médiatique, sociale et sociétale“, Images Secondes, Issue 6, France.