Twenty years ago, after a water-skiing accident claimed my left leg, I loved to watch The Bionic Woman, a TV show out a young woman -- also disabled in an accident -- who was transformed into a superhero via futuristic prosthetics.

Initially, I couldn't resist being drawn into the fantasy of such possibilities. However, my fascination soon focussed on the character portrayed by Lindsay Wagner. I enjoyed watching her match wits with clever foes and patriarchal bosses within a secret-service hierarchy -- questioning her otherness and foregoing marriage to the dull but hunk-like Bionic Man in favour of a path of personal discovery.

Today, The Bionic Woman might be criticized for concealing the realities of disability behind the cloak of science fiction or for subtly reinforcing the notion that a woman with a disability cannot fit into the traditional female roles of wife and mother. Back then, such interpretations eluded me. Watching the show certainly didn't make life in a non-disabled world any easier, but it did bolster my internal resistance to accepting certain limitations of my situation by helping me work to create a satisfying unconventional life within the confines of convention -- a life which included marriage and a career.

In recent years, I've found few televisual images of disability upon which to pleasurably fantasize. News reports typically sensationalize pathologies, casting individuals as tragic victims or as heroes for merely exercising the instinct to survive. In Canadian drama and comedy, female characters with disabilities are conspicuously absent. South of the border, fictionalized images are turning up occasionally, albeit as poster children for a white, post-feminist world.

ABC's made-for-TV film, Suddenly, had the Las Vegas headliner Ann Jillian playing a rambunctious waitress, bitching and boozing her way through paraplegia until her emotional rescuer (a man with a disability) made everything right. She never works through her anger and grief over becoming disabled through a discovery of her own abilities; her sense of self-esteem was tied to her attractiveness to men. When a nondisabled boyfriend dumps her, a disabled guy picks up the slack. One wonders what would have happened if he hadn't turned up to show her the basics about life in a wheelchair, including sex? Would she have remained a hopeless drunk, forever celibate and bitter?

Another version of the 'powerless disabled woman' turned up in the series Early Edition. Shanesia Davis-Williams plays Marissa, a black woman who is blind. In the first few episodes, we see her as a receptionist at a brokerage house. She is capable at her job, but incapable, we're led to believe, of acquiring a guide dog -- the white male lead character buys one for her. In the real world, guide dogs are expensive and there is a waiting list for getting them free of charge. However, most people who are blind are also very astute about working the system to get them. They do not rely on casual acquaintances to help them with something so basic to their needs. Throughout the series, Marissa is relegated to offering words of wisdom and to performing passive tasks, such as making phone calls. We learn little about her personal life until an episode where an educated criminal worms his way into her heart and then physically assaults her. Does she fend off the attack? Does her dog? Conveniently, no. The lead guy bursts in to rescue her.

The late 1980s and early 1990s held out a glimmer of hope when deaf actor Marlee Marlin burst upon the scene. Her complex characters in the film Children of a Lesser God (now shown on TV) and the series Picket Fences suggested for the first time to mass audiences that women with disabilities really are women first: capable of a wide range of emotions, experiences, strengths and weaknesses which may or may not have to do with disability. As the outlaw-turned-mayor in Picket Fences, Matlin's character was embroiled in a number of social, political and romantic dilemmas. Sometimes she was wise and fearless; other times, foolish and sentimental. Guided by a strong sense of ethics, she nevertheless often played the clown -- but did so with consummate dignity. In a way, she typified the postmodern ideal of diversity that some media producers claim to espouse.

Postmodernity aside, mass media is slow to shed its various skins of bigotry until public opinion -- usually sparked by activism -- demands more realism in front of the screen. Madin's short-lived film and television popularity was likely triggered by the recent activism of deaf culture. Over the years, American Sign Language (ASL) has emerged as the primary means of communication among deaf persons, resulting in a kind of ethnic subculture with its own history and politics.

Within the women's movement, old stereotypes die hard too. In Women With Disabilities: Essays in Psychology, Culture and Politics (Temple University Press, 1988) authors Adrienne Asch and Michelle Fine argued that non-disabled feminists perceive disabled women as "childlike, helpless and victimized" and severed us from the sisterhood "in an effort to advance more powerful, competent and appealing icons."

Even today, mainstream disability rights activists tend to collapse our needs into a male-stream construct: ignoring, as well, issues of class, race and other psycho-social factors which significantly influence one's experience of disability. Diane Driedger made similar observations in the Canadian anthology The More We Get Together: Women & Disability (Gynergy Books, 1992), noting that women involved in Canadian disability organizations often experienced sexism.

Historically, disability rehabilitation and advocacy focused on war-wounded and work-injured men. As this advocacy broadened to include women, we were nevertheless expected to leave our personal and social perspectives at the door. During my own rehabilitation in mid-1970s Montreal, I remember being silenced by a physician when I expressed concerns about dating and sex. His response to my questions suggested to me that I should have been ashamed for thinking about such things when I should be concentrating on mastering an artificial leg.

In the book Voice from the Shadows: Women with Disabilities Speak Out (Women's Press, 1983) author Gwyneth Matthews similarly recalls that "people were shocked speechless" when they learned she was interested in sex, while P. Israel and C. McPherson added "articles, books and films that treat issues of sexuality of the disabled usually deal with the male's needs and concerns."

During the 1980s, women with disabilities moved to fill the advocacy gap. Hard-working and under-funded, such feminist groups as the Canadian Disabled Women's Network (DAWN) and the San Francisco-based Disabled Women's Alliance lobbied for basic rights such as health care and the right to choose their sexual partners. While a greater diversity is beginning to find its way into print and non-commercial film (e.g. the book Our Bodies, Ourselves by the Boston Women's Health Collective and the ground-breaking National Film Board documentary Towards Intimacy) mass media producers seem to be making attempts -- some successfully, some not -- to free women with disabilities from the limitations of sexist and ableist stereotyping.

Such diversity is beginning to emerge in the character of Kerry Weaver, the crutch-wielding, poker-faced hospital administrator played by Laura Innes on the TV series ER. Her appearance in previous seasons cast her as a cardboard villain -- the quintessential 'administrator with no heart.' She had the air of the 'dragon lady bosses' of 1950s Hollywood films in which powerful, professional women were often portrayed as social pariahs. During earlier episodes, Kerry Weaver's brains and her strength earned her little respect (much less friendship) from the other characters. As she crutched across the screen at breakneck speed and performed admirably in various situations, other characters were shown giving her dirty looks and whispering behind her back. According to NBC, this portrayal earned Innes a nomination in 1996 for a Viewers for Quality Television Award. Perhaps some viewers were so awed by any sign of a person with a disability in a position of authority that they were willing to overlook the character's unlovable personality. In any case, this past season, Kerry Weaver was shown in a considerably more complex light. She befriended a co-worker with AIDS, agonized over impending budget cuts ... then fired the worker with AIDS while simultaneously giving herself a deserved raise. If you've ever been an over-worked supervisor or manager you might empathize with the character. If you've ever been laid off under similar circumstances, you would have hated her guts. In the last show of the last season, however, Kerry Weaver's vulnerability was revealed and the audience saw her suffering physically for the first time. The stereotype is held up at two ends: people with disabilities should not be portrayed as helpless victims any more than they be portrayed as 'super crips.' In the real world, women with disabilities may need to modify their physical activities with the help of staff and superiors. A person like Kerry Weaver would need to advocate for her own support in a way that didn't compromise her professionalism. Hopefully, the show's writers will spell some of these issues out more clearly next season.

Children of a Lesser God

The 1988 film Children of a Lesser God, with its undercurrents of disability feminism, is a notable exception to common stereotyping of women with disabilities. In the film, James Leeds, played by William Hurt, is a hearing teacher who arrives at a school for the deaf anxious to try out his unorthodox methods for teaching deaf teenagers to speak. His efforts are accepted by virtually everyone but Sarah Norman, one of the school's brightest graduates who is now working there as a janitor. Sarah, played by Marlee Marlin, communicates through sign language (interpreted haltingly by James throughout the film) and through facial and body language that needs no translation.

The film criticizes the 'oralist' tradition of teaching deaf people to speak: a tradition which many members of deaf culture regard as demeaning and oppressive. James lures his students into learning speech (lip) reading and vocalization through methods that few teenagers (and hearing viewers) can resist: humor, rock music and dancing. James tries to sell Sarah on the joys of oral speech, but she isn't buying. Captivated by her beauty, wit and tempestuous spirit, James keeps pushing -- Sarah keeps resisting -- the struggle catches fire and the two end up in each other's arms.

As the plot develops, James and Sarah straggle to fit into each other's worlds. Gradually, it dawns on James that teaching deaf people to speak can be a form of aggression and control; a way of dragging them into the hearing world. By the second half of the movie, Sarah's painful past (rejection by her parents, sexual exploitation by hearing boys) are revealed and she leaves James to confront her past and build a life of her own.

The film also explores undercurrents of sexism. Only hearing males are in positions of authority at the school. The filming technique exemplifies what American feminist theorist Laura Mulvey calls the "male gaze." Sarah is positioned as the object of either James' eye -- or the eye of some unseen voyeuristic cameraman. Few of Sarah's actions are explicitly sexual, but the camera makes them appear so -- for example, by showing close-ups of her face 'feeling' the wind in her sleep or her body gliding through the water as she swims or her unique style of dancing at a dinner-club.

As well, having James translate Sarah's sign language for the audience lends a patriarchal feel to the narrative. The filmmakers might have thought that using sub-titles would be visually jarring, but they would have focused viewer attention more on Sarah, who was -- after all -- doing the talking.

In spite of the film's shortcomings, Matlin's dynamic performance gives viewers an opportunity to contemplate female disability in a different light. Sarah is angry much of the time: toward co-workers and bigoted administrators who give her grief, and to James when he lapses into his control trip. From a patriarchal perspective, Sarah's bitchiness appears stereotypical -- the disabled person angry at the world -- however, from a feminist perspective, these images are an empowering contradiction of the passive stereotype of female disability. Like the male disability writer who stated in his critique that he could find "no clear source" for Sarah's anger, viewers who don't understand Sarah's anger might attempt to refocus their conceptual lens. If being labeled 'retarded' for seven years of one's life, or abandoned by parents, or sexually exploited doesn't qualify as a legitimate source for a character's anger, then what does?

The fact is that patriarchal logic condemns overt anger in women and Sarah defies this logic. In doing so, she empowers herself with anger and uses it to bring about change.

The Media of Many Lenses

Janice Radway, a noted feminist media theorist, has argued that "opportunities exist within the mass-communication process for individuals to resist, alter and re-appropriate the material designed elsewhere for their purchase." In other words, even though mass-communicated messages promote a mainstream and even stereotyped ideology, they are also "polysemic" -- open to many meanings which individual viewers, depending on their own experiences, interpret differently.

Nevertheless, some viewers are less able to resist than others. Moreover, even the most creative viewers may find it difficult to read alternative messages. Ultimately, diversity must be built into scripts; it doesn't just happen. Among the ways to increase diversity is to have characters (disabled or otherwise) behave in a variety of ways, thus evoking a believable and complex range of responses from other characters.

Children of a Lesser God, as well as TV shows like Picket Fences, are recent examples of increased diversity in roles for women with disabilities (although Matlin seems to have disappeared from the screen). The creators of ER's Kerry Weaver, meanwhile, appear to be still fence-sitting. Will she emerge next season as a fully human character with foibles, strengths and complexities that may or may not have to do with her disability? And will Canadian drama produce a female character with a disability in a prime time drama of substance? Stay tuned.