The ICO presents Crip Melodrama: She’s Hysterical, highlighting Todd Haynes’ iconic SAFE (1995) as it turns 30!
Join us to explore the complex representation of disabled women within melodrama in this mini-tour of screenings, thoughtfully programmed by deaf and disabled curators Emily Simmons, Charlie Little and Florence Grieve.
The ‘hysterical’ woman is a staple of melodrama. She is emotional, unstable, defiant, and often, disabled. This familiar character reflects our culture’s understanding of sick women. Placing the stereotype of the hysterical woman under the microscope, SAFE is a perfect title with which to examine disabled women in the genre.
The third event in our tour of ‘Crip Melodrama: She’s Hysterical’, will be a screening of Safe on 7th December at the Midlands Arts Centre (MAC) in Birmingham from 2pm. After the screening Florence will be leading a relaxed zine (a DIY magazine) making workshop, where participants are invited to explore how disabled women are represented in melodrama, by making their own zines.
Film synopsis
Carol White (Julianne Moore), a Southern Californian housewife, begins experiencing disorienting symptoms: headaches, congestion, dry cough, nosebleeds, vomiting and trouble breathing. Dismissed by the people around her and deteriorating with every passing day, Safe is a thoughtful and unnerving representation of what it is to be sick under neoliberal capitalism. Rather than play into the ableist misogyny that invented the idea of hysteria, instead, Safe exposes it to the audience. Carol is a hysterical woman, but it is not ‘all in her head’.
