Hazardous Futures and Damned Embodiments: Disability and White Masculinization in Science Fiction Film

Drawing on critical disability interrogations of the "human," this article explores how frameworks of normalization shape conceptions of human qualification and disqualification in two science fiction films. It examines how representations of the contaminated, injured, unstable, and mutated body produce discourses of, and social anxieties about, abnormalization and monstrosity. The films The Thing (1982) and Deadpool (2016), both characterized by science fiction cult popularity, are linked through multiple concerns for human futurity, including the dangers of monstrous disability and the need to redeem damaged and infected bodies. Bringing disability together with gender and race, the article argues that white able-bodied masculinization in the films, including aspects of militarism and colonialism, focuses on human qualification and on securing a future made non-hazardous by a masculinity recuperated from vulnerability and disability.