The presence of disability in popular culture has taken many forms; indeed, people with disabilities (PWDs) have appeared frequently across the pop-culture spectrum: movies, television, print media, dance, theater, music, and sports. Disability representations have never been in short supply, though many produced by the mainstream cultural industries remain questionable at best, hurtful and divisive at worst.

Images of disability have perhaps found their most frequent expression in movies, with the vast majority created from the perspective of able-bodied filmmakers and intended primarily for able-bodied audiences. The earliest silent movies, each only a few minutes long, tended to portray PWDs as comic figures given to pursuing others or being pursued themselves, as in The Legless Runner (1907), The Invalid's Adventure (1907), and Don't Pull My Leg (1908). As the medium matured, moviemakers borrowed heavily from such nineteenth-century literary fare as Moby Dick, A Christmas Carol, Notre Dame de Paris (The Hunchback...