In March 2026, my article « Le handicap fictionnel dans la science-fiction artistique » was published by BoD in a volume edited by Clément Pélissier and Jérôme Goffette for the academic association Stella Incognita.
Reference of the conference proceedings:
Jessica Ragazzini, « Le handicap fictionnel dans la science-fiction artistique », in handicaps et Science-fiction, edited by Clément Pélissier and Jérôme Goffette, Université Grenoble Alpes, organized by Stella Incognita, BoD, France, 2026.
The Gaze on the Body and Disability Through the Photographic Lens
From Deborah Kara Unger’s unsettling performance in the film adaptation of Crash (1996) to Rosa Salazar portraying the cyborg Alita in Alita: Battle Angel (2019), and Sam Worthington in the role of Jake Sully in Avatar (2009), mainstream science-fiction cinema presents a gallery of fictionally altered bodies. These characters—often portrayed by able-bodied actors—simulate disability or bear its marks within narratives where power, desire, and technology intersect.
At the same time, late twentieth-century photography also explored these bodies beyond normative limits, particularly through the practices of Helmut Newton and Joel-Peter Witkin. Newton, renowned for his provocative fashion photographs published in Vogue, combines eroticism, prosthesis, and staged bodily posture within an aesthetic of power and stylization. Witkin, for his part, constructs baroque and macabre photographic tableaux in which physical alterity—whether real or fictional—becomes sublime, transgressive, and almost religious. Despite their aesthetic differences, these two artists share a common interest in bodies in tension with normative standards. Disability—whether simulated or real—thus becomes the vehicle for a visual reflection on the boundaries of the body. These representations shift the question of disability beyond the strictly medical sphere, transforming it into a surface of artistic, philosophical, and political projection.
Structure of the Article
The introduction raises the question of limits: what is gained by representing disability in simulated or augmented forms? What purpose do such representations serve? Which social realities do these fictions obscure or reveal?
Drawing on an interdisciplinary framework that brings together posthumanist theories (Donna Haraway[1], N. Katherine Hayles[2], Rosi Braidotti[3]), critical disability studies (crip theory, David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder[4]), and aesthetic approaches derived from art history and fashion studies, this study examines the narrative and symbolic functions of disability in speculative narratives. It first retraces a genealogy of altered bodies throughout the history of representation—from ancient myths to the modernist avant-gardes—in order to understand how amputated bodies, mechanized bodies, and bodies reconfigured through technology are embedded within a long visual and philosophical tradition of monstrosity and hybridity..
[1] Haraway (Donna) : A Cyborg Manifesto, in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature..
[2] Hayles (N. Katherine) : How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics.
[3] Braidotti (Rosi) : The Posthuman.
[4] Mitchell (David T) et Snyder (Sharon L.) : Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse.