Dances and Discourses of (Dis)Ability: Heather Mills's Embodiment of Disability onDancing with the Stars

Abstract

This essay explores the relationships among disability, performance, and dance studies. Individuals with disabilities are often marginalized in current dance scholarship. Heather Mills's performances on Dancing with the Stars insert a dancer with a disability into mainstream perceptions of dance. This essay discusses three themes that emerge from an analysis of journalistic and blogger reactions to her performances. These themes reveal both empowering and disempowering potentialities for individuals with and without disabilities. Conclusions and implications for our understanding of disability, dance, and performance are offered.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 48 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.