• Debalina Banerjee

Body is the locus of identity, sexuality and gender performativity. The female body more importantly is the site of male gaze and desire, where the operative rhetoric is beauty. The quality called beauty is a cultural manufacture and a social behaviour that women learn to appropriate. The cult of masculinity on the other hand seeks to posses women who pander to these set standards of physical beauty. The paradigms of beauty then function to repress, rather than celebrate womanhood. It is more about patriarchal power and control. If a woman is already the ‘other’, defined by her body, what happens to disabled women? The disabled woman is further stigmatized because she violates the norm of the aesthetic. Body imaging renders her ab(norm)al, physically and mentally redundant. Feminist and disability rights are born from the same anguish. They are social movements that acknowledge oppression as stemming not from a biological reality but from a socially constructed inequality and hence seek to dismantle hegemonic power structures; in sex, in work, in reproduction. They are concerned with unlearning notions of idealized human bodies. Bolt and Brink described the powerful effect of physical appearance on how people are evaluated, concluding that ‘‘a widespread physical attractiveness stereotype exists’’ in which attractive people are assumed to possess various desirable qualities whereas those whose appearance is less pleasing are viewed negatively (qtd in Anderson 185). The long term effect of this indoctrination is that physical attractiveness becomes a standard for measuring the character or worth of persons leading ‘‘those with visible deficiencies” to become “stigmatized by culture as deviants, because they embody our fears of failure and death” (qtd in Anderson 185).

"Of Cognition, Erotica and Cerebral Palsy: Body, Beauty and Disability in Margarita with a Straw", International Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research (www.jetir.org), ISSN:2349-5162, Vol.10, Issue 4, page no.n77-n85, April-2023, Available :http://www.jetir.org/papers/JETIR2304F13.pdf

"Of Cognition, Erotica and Cerebral Palsy: Body, Beauty and Disability in Margarita with a Straw", International Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research (www.jetir.org | UGC and issn Approved), ISSN:2349-5162, Vol.10, Issue 4, page no. ppn77-n85, April-2023, Available at : http://www.jetir.org/papers/JETIR2304F13.pdf