[acb-hsp] Disability gender and difference: Article

[J.Rayl]

I believe we had a discussion about this one not long ago.

Disability, Gender and Difference on the Sopranos
by Kathleen Lebesco
Some of the same attitudes about the body which contribute to women's oppression
generally also contribute to the social and psychological disablement of people who
have physical disabilities.
-Susan Wendell, "Toward a Feminist Theory of Disability"
The disabled female figure occupies an intragender position; that is, she is not
only defined against the masculine figure, but she is imagined as the antithesis
of the normative woman as well. But because representation structures reality, the
cultural figures that haunt the days of the living often must, like Virginia Woolf
s Angel of the House, be wrestled to the floor before even modest self-definition,
let alone political action, can proceed.
-Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, "Feminist Theory, the Body, and the Disabled Figure"
In representations from cave drawings through ancient Greek tragedies to contemporary
television shows, what we call disability, "that which characterizes a body as deviant
from shared norms of bodily appearance and ability . .. has functioned throughout
history as one of the most marked and remarked on differences that propel the act
of storytelling into existence" (Mitchell 20-21). Despite its prominent position
as an impetus for the generation of stories, however, disability has attracted little
attention in scholarship until relatively recently (Snyder, Brueggemann, and Garland-Thomson
2). Scholarly work done over the last twenty years has begun to address the ideologies
present in the texts of our most prolific cultural storyteller, television. In their
study of portrayals of disability on British television, Guy Cumberbatch and Ralph
Negrine contend that "the history of . . . entertainment suggests that fictional
forms are an important vehicle for the representation of life, and that the techniques
and repertoires of representation carry some meaning about the way in which people
in that society conceptualise and deal with everyday existence" (42; see also Mitchell
24).
My project aims to further explore this premise by examining issues of gender and
disability, and highlighting story lines from the critically acclaimed HBO series
The Sopranos. The series has provided thoughtful and provocative commentary on the
body, particularly the disabled female body, from the very first scene of its premiere
episode. Tony, the main character (played by James Gandolfini), sits in a waiting
room awaiting his first visit with his new therapist. The camera catches him staring
ponderously at a statue of a nude woman. In ways that I intend to outline in this
essay, that scene is a blueprint not only for the imperative to read representations
of the female body on the rest of the show, but also in everyday life.
Against the larger backdrop of my analysis of gender and disability on the show,
I provide a close reading of the Ginny Sacrimoni story line, in which mobster John
Sacrimoni seeks vengeance against a colleague who made a rude joke about his very
fat but apparently dieting wife, and the Svetlana Kirilenko story line in which mob
boss Tony Soprano has a brief sexual dalliance with his uncle's tough-talking one-legged
caregiver. Though disability permeates The Sopranos, I am particularly interested
in how it plays itself out in the lives of these two minor female characters on the
show. Irving Zola asserts that many studies of television lose sight of important
representations of disability because of their narrow focus on major characters and
major plot lines ("Depictions of Disability" 14), and this essay is intended, in
part, as a corrective to this problem. In addition, Wendell argues that "physical
'imperfection' is more likely to be thought to 'spoil' a woman than a man by rendering
her unattractive in a culture where her physical appearance is a large component
of a woman's value" (The Rejected Body 43-44). Disability for women, then, presents
a fascinating feminist issue.
I wonder whether widespread critical acclaim for the show in the form of Emmys and
awards from the Television Critics Association, the Directors Guild, the Writers
Guild, the Screen Actors Guild, the American Film Institute, and others, raises our
expectations in terms of the ideologies it presents about disability. The series
avoids the monster and criminal characterizations discussed by Paul Longmore (69-70),
but how much better does The Sopranos do? In trying to address this question, I consider
these popular representations of fatness and amputeeism in an attempt to explicate
their social and political significance to both disability politics and to a culture
deeply invested in marginalizing difference. This entails an examination of the extent
to which the characters of Ginny and Svetlana are the agents (subjects) of their
own lives, and to what extent they are subject to hegemonic ideologies about disability
and gender. Jim Swan elaborates on this distinction: "The notion of a subject of
discourse can have two contradictory meanings. It is either one who is subject to
the hegemony of a cultural ideology that is internalized and therefore inaccessible
and nonnegotiable; or it is one who acts as agent and subject of cultural meanings
that are understood to be contingent, negotiable, and revisable" (285).
Gender and Disability on The Sopranos
Many characters on The Sopranos have disabilities, both traditional and metaphorical.
But what is more interesting is how the audience is encouraged to adopt certain attitudes
toward particular characters (disabled or not) based on the attitudes those characters
exhibit toward disability, and how this happens in a gendered fashion. The dramatic
conceit behind the show's first season was the conflict that would be generated when
a mafia tough-guy, Tony, needed to seek therapy for his panic attacks. If panic attacks
and dependence on psychological help are perceived to weaken a man, then Tony is
understood as disabled by his peers.
In other scenes, we learn that Tony has learned with age to be respectful of others
who are disabled. He tries to comfort his nephew Christopher, who thinks he has cancer;
when Tony says, "You're just depressed," Christopher rebuffs this possibility, stating
"Me? I'm no mental midget." Thus, Tony is again reminded how socially disabling any
perception of difference can be. In therapy, Tony tells a story from his childhood
about making fun of a neighborhood kid who had a cleft palate-Jimmy Smash, they called
him-but says he finally knows what it is like to be used for someone else's amusement.
Though Tony continues to make fun of Jimmy, imitating his distinctive speech pattern,
he appears quite empathie nonetheless. This characterization continues in a later
season when Tony learns for the first time of a "slow" uncle, Hercules, who was institutionalized
and thus Tony never knew him; he seems troubled to find out that Livia, his mother,
found Hercules a charity home and thus segregated him from his family and the rest
of the community. In yet another scene, fellow mobster Pussy Bonpensiero tells Tony's
son about how caring Tony was as a teenager, how Tony went with him every day to
visit Pussy's sister when she was dying. In an unrelated subplot, after one of his
men, Richie, beats pizzeria owner Beansie Gaeta so badly that he becomes paraplegic,
Tony insists that Richie build a wheelchair ramp on Beansie's house, alter his toilets,
and widen his doorways. Tony even tries to give Beansie fifty thousand dollars "to
donate to the Spinal Cord Injury Association, pick you up, inspire people." Though
Beansie resists, Tony prevails and leaves with a huge smile on his face, clearly
indicating his feeling that he has done good in the world. From these moments, a
very sympathetic picture of Tony emerges, despite his morally compromising line of
work. The scenes with Beansie reveal a sense of disability politics on the part of
the show's writers; those in the know recognize Tony as well-intended but patronizing,
championing a poster-boy mentality that plagues charity efforts today. Still, viewers
are able to see him as a partly good and noble character because of his sympathetic
attitudes toward those with disabilities and illnesses. These attitudes become a
type of barometer for the morality of the characters on The Sopranos and elsewhere
in popular culture.
Given Tony's resistance to calling what he thinks are typical conditions "disabilities,"
this picture of Tony as kind-to-small-dogs-and-disabled people is a complicated one.
Anthony Jr., Tony and Carmela's chubby adolescent son, is diagnosed with a likely
case of Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) at school. When Tony claims that all Anthony
Jr. needs is "a good whack upside the head," Carmela retorts, "You'd hit someone
who's sick? You'd hit someone with polio?" She seeks reassurance from the school
counselor that it is indeed a sickness, and subsequently Tony and she make frequent
comparisons to polio when explaining AJ's condition to others. Still, Tony resists
medicalizing AJ's ADD; he reminds people that fidgeting is typical for kids, and
tells the school staff "Every time you people see a problem, you turn it into a disease."
Even when AJ himself says he is depressed, Tony corrects him, telling him that he
is sad and angry because of his own stupid actions-again resisting the medicalization
of typical human emotions. One might interpret this as Tony's effort simply to save
his male heir from the degradation of being labeled "disabled" in any way. Conversely,
the text also supports a competing reading: this dialogue represents Tony's preoccupation
with authentic and genuine disability, his commitment to sympathy for those with
disabilities he deems to be real, and his disdain for those whose conditions are
faked, controllable, or unnecessarily trumped-up by the medical establishment.
Two female characters on the show inhabit this latter group, the inauthentically
disabled and thus the unworthy of unflagging devotion: Livia, Tony's difficult and
scheming mother, and Janice, his difficult and scheming sister. Livia is losing some
of her faculties as she ages, yet she vociferously resists being thrown into a nursing
home, claiming "I've seen those women in wheelchairs babbling like idiots." Tony
persists in putting her into a "retirement community," and she retaliates in Lady
Macbeth fashion by winding up Tony's uncle to put a hit on Tony. The hit attempt
fails, and Livia begins to fake Alzheimer's disease so that, in Carmela's words,
"she doesn't get called on her shit." Realizing this, a raging Tony heads out to
smother Livia, only to find that she's had a stroke. Tony's anger is framed as fully
justified, and perhaps because of the accomplished malevolence with which actress
Nancy Marchand played Livia, fans of that episode cheered as Tony lunged down the
hall with pillow in hand.
Livia's tendency to fake disability appears to run in the family, but seems confined
to those with XX chromosomes. Tony's estranged sister Janice appears in the second
season, fresh from a lengthy stint on total disability from the State of Washington.
When Tony asks, "Oh, for the Epstein-Barr?" and Janice demurs, "No, Carpal Tunnel
Syndrome," we get the sense that she has made a habit of using disability claims
to get out of work and to collect a paycheck. Her own mother, Livia, refers to Janice
as "a snake in the grass," and Carmela points out to Tony that Janice has no work
ethic. She is framed as a manipulator, as very much having reappeared only to get
her cut of her elderly mother's estate. This characterization of Janice as a despicable
character reaches its zenith in a later season when she steals the prosthetic leg
of Svetlana, Livia's amputee home health aide (who is discussed in greater detail
below). Though the audience has witnessed Janice kill, steal, and lie before, it
is this act of treachery that seals her fate as morally unredeemable. Stealing a
leg from an "innocent" disabled woman registers as more problematic than her retaliatory
killing of her sleazy, abusive fiancé, Richie Aprile, largely because viewers realize
(in the lingua franca of The Sopranos) that Richie "had it coming."
What I propose to do in the remainder of this essay is examine two forms of disability-one,
amputeeism, considered to be of the "authentic" variety, and the other, fatness,
considered to be controllable and thus "inauthentic." Many of the characterizations
of women on The Sopranos are filtered through the experiences and attitudes of male
characters, particularly Tony. I believe that a close investigation of the framing
of a fat character and an amputee against this backdrop will provide a nuanced analysis
of the preferred ideological reading of disability issues for audience members.
Case Study: Fatness and Amputeeism
Svetlana Kirilenko was introduced in the second season of The Sopranos as the somewhat
severe Russian home health care aide for Tony Soprano's ailing mother. Through digital
special effects, the nondisabled Russian actress and daughter of deaf parents Alia
Kliouka appears to have lost part of one of her legs-though mostly she wears a prosthetic.
Irving Zola notes the conservative tendency of television where visual depictions
of certain disabilities are concerned: "There is simply a taboo against showing any
missing parts, be it the result of a radical mastectomy or an amputation" ("Depictions
of Disability" 11). Despite their slogan, "It's not TV, it's HBO," HBO follows suit
in the depiction of Svetlana, who is rarely shown without her prosthesis. When she
is shown without it, she often wears a long dress or skirt so that her stump is not
visible. While early on she was a minor character relegated to the periphery of the
action, Svetlana came to the forefront after Livia's death.
In season four of The Sopranos, Tony's Uncle Junior was ill, so Svetlana was back
in the picture as she and her staff of aides cared for him. During one fateful visit
to his uncle, Tony admired Svetlana's determination as she explained how she was
teaching herself to build a website for her business. "You've got every reason to
be in the bottle, but you're not," Tony mused. For him, Svetlana's disability signaled
a free pass to alcoholism and depression, and he couldn't help but be a little awed
by her pluck. This pluck, along with Svetlana's for-once relaxed beauty, proved seductive;
Tony and Svetlana ended up having sex on the sofa. Afterwards, in his customary brush-off,
Tony told her "I'll call you in a few days." Svetlana replied, "Tony, come on. You're
a nice guy, but I got my own problems. I don't want all the time to prop you up."
Tony was a bit stunned by the idea that a woman who uses a prosthetic would be so
nervy as to talk about propping him up, but he knew what she meant. What a change
this is from the love affair in which the nondisabled partner manages to love the
disabled one in spite of his/her disability, and in which the disabled partner feels
completely unworthy.
Here we see a passionate disabled woman capable of enjoying a quick affair, but recognizing
the nondisabled partner (Tony) as an emotional drain she's unwilling to take on.
Svetlana is independent and sassy. In a later conversation, reacting to Tony's solipsism
and self-absorption, Svetlana remarked, "Americans expect nothing bad to ever happen;
the rest of the world expects only bad, and they are not disappointed." She's describing
American arrogance and entitlement from a Russian perspective, but her statement
is also compelling from a disability perspective.
Svetlana manages to avoid the stereotypical portrayal of people with disabilities
as "sexually deviant and even dangerous, asexual, or sexually incapacitated either
physically or emotionally" (Longmore 72; see also Zola, "Depictions of Disability"
11). Longmore writes that "disabled characters may be quite capable of physical love
making, but spurn opportunities for romance because of a lack of self-acceptance"
(73). While at first this might seem to be the case with Svetlana, in fact she doesn't
pursue romance with Tony because of his emotional weakness. Svetlana's sex scene
flies in the face of the tradition of disabled women rarely being portrayed as sexual
beings (Finger 10; Lonsdale 7; Meekosha and Dowse in Barnes, Mercer, and Shakespeare
196; Zola, Missing Pieces 214; Garland-Thomson, "Feminist Theory" 285), and at the
same time contains no cues to suggest devoteeism, either. Tom Shakespeare contends
that "in modern western societies, sexual agency is considered the essential element
of full adult personhood, replacing the role formerly taken by paid work: because
disabled people are infantilized, and denied the status of active subjects, consequently
their sexuality is undermined" (192). As both a paid worker and a sexual subject,
Svetlana is accorded full personhood, even as a minor character.
Despite noteworthy commonalities, fatness differs from other more customarily recognized
forms of disability in consequential ways. According to Rosemarie Garland-Thomson,
"disability . . . is the attribution of corporeal deviance-not so much a property
of bodies as a product of cultural rules about what bodies should be or do" (Extraordinary
Bodies 6). Fat people, in their excessive refusal to be disciplined into culturally
"acceptable" body shapes and sizes, are then as corporeally deviant as those others
considered, without a second thought, to be disabled. However, for some, the key
difference lies in the perceived ability to control the conditions of one's disability-in
the disabled person's culpability in his or her own situation. While many commonly
"recognized forms of disability like amputeeism invite relatively little discourse
about what the disabled person has done to deserve his or her loss of limb, the condition
of fatness, not widely understood as a disability, tempts considerable public disdain
for the fat person's weakness and lack of self-control.1 Such presumptions manifest
themselves in collective attitudes about and cultural representations of those to
whom corporeal deviance is attributed.2
In contrast to Svetlana, Ginny Sacrimoni is desexualized-"wifed"-as the spouse of
New York mob underboss and friend of Tony "Johnny Sack." Played by Denise Borino,
a fat New Jersey-ite with no prior acting experience who answered an open casting
call, the minor character of Ginny is always perfectly coiffed, elegantly dressed,
and what the medical establishment would call "morbidly obese." Her body size became
central to the plot of The Sopranos in season four when Ralph Cifaretto, a notoriously
sleazy and widely disliked member of Tony's crew, tells a joke among fellow crew
members about Ginny having to have a 90-pound mole removed from her ass. Though immediately
greeted with howling laughter, the joke makes its way through the grapevine back
to Ginny's husband John, who finds it no laughing matter. John explodes in anger,
beating and urinating on one of Ralph's men who had laughed at the joke at the initial
gathering. When Tony finds out, he confronts John, trying to understand what has
made his friend so out of control; when he learns that it is the mole joke come home
to roost, Tony sheepishly feigns ignorance and condemns it as deplorable.
Tony: Well if he did say it I didn't hear it, 'cause he knows better than to make
a remark like that when I'm around.
John: She's fighting a weight problem since the kids were born. Weight Watchers,
Richard Simmons, fasting. She works very fucking hard.
Tony: You're tellin' me how hard it is?
John: It's different for women: body image, self esteem. I'll tell you though, I
never had a problem with her weight. To me she's beautiful-Ruebenesque. That woman
is my life. To think she's being mocked . . .
Tony: All right, look, I'm not gonna sit here and deny that Ralph can be a fucking
asshole. And that was a horrible thing to say, but even if it was said, you can't
be serious about him winding up . . . uh . . . you know . . .
John: She's the mother of my children.
Tony: I know she is, John, I know she is. At least hear Ralph out; how long we go
back, all of us?
(The Sopranos, episode 43: "The Weight")
John, increasingly incensed by Ralph's insensitivity, appeals to his boss Carmine
to sanction a hit on Ralph in the name of Ginny's honor. Carmine agrees that the
comment was inappropriate, but suggests that Ralph should be taxed, not whacked.
John is unhappy with this solution. Throughout the next several scenes, John makes
it known that "the ship on apologies has sailed," and that nothing short of revenge
will satisfy him. His irrational behavior troubles Carmine, who orders John killed
because his hotheadedness stands to undermine a profitable connection with Tony's
crew. In turn, John orders a hit on Ralph to avenge Ginny's honor.
Whenever Ginny herself appears in this episode, she performs diet behavior. In one
scene she weighs herself, in another she weighs her food portions, and in another
she's making a fruit salad with low-fat topping. This all changes in a pivotal scene
when John discovers just how much of a performance the dieting really is. Realizing
he forgot something that he had planned to take on his road trip, John returns to
the house to find Ginny crouched in the basement over a large box full of candy.
Furious, he yells, "What the hell is this? I thought you were on the Atkins!" Ginny,
petulant, guards the candy and cries, "I was. I am. It's hard, John; I'm trying."
The exchange heats up, and viewers (but not Ginny) realize that John, who loves his
wife even with her fat body, is highly agitated because he realizes he's put a hit
on a man who insulted the honor of his wife-an honor not quite worth defending if
she won't submit to the socially acceptable rigors of dieting. In other words, Ginny-as-fat
is defensible only if Ginny is trying her damnedest not to be fat.3
Ginny is revealed as a woman who will not, or cannot, control her fatness through
dieting. "In a culture which loves the idea that the body can be controlled, those
who cannot control their bodies are seen (and may see themselves) as failures" (Wendell,
"Toward a Feminist Theory" 269). With the best of intentions, John's "don't blame
the victim" mindset perniciously undermines fat subjectivity. Furthermore, it continues
a dubious tradition of women with disabilities being represented as victims (Zola,
"Depictions of Disability" 5; Dahl 76). "The dominant images [of disabled people]
mirror the roles that are expected of men and women. These are that women must be
passive and invisible and expressive, while men must be active and aggressive and
instrumental" (Lonsdale 59).4
In the next scene, John, having already called off the hit on Ralph, goes to Tony
and says that he's decided to accept Ralph's apology, but warns "No more weight remarks-they're
hurtful, and they're destructive." No longer worried about John's hotheadedness,
Tony can now quietly call off the hit Carmine had ordered on John. Ultimately, John's
ability to tolerate the mobster's anti-fat prejudice-to curb his role as crusader
for fat dignity-saves his own life.
The framing of Svetlana's amputeeism and Ginny's fatness cannot be understood in
a vacuum. In order to extrapolate the ideologies underpinning these representations,
it is necessary to consider the context in which they exist. Toward that end, I want
to make some observations about the gendering of body problems on the show and in
larger discourse, and the differences in the portrayals of amputation and fatness
as forms of disability. Although I have chosen to discuss storylines highlighting
two female characters, this should not be read to mean that The Sopranos problematizes
only female bodies. The show has portrayed men living with cancer and drug addiction
among other forms of affliction. Despite the presence of several fat men and at least
two fat women in the cast, including the lead (James Gandolfini), fatness as a problem
is never given more than a passing remark except in the case of Ginny; in fact, The
Sopranos "repeatedly renounces the fit body and the typical means of attaining it"
(Santo 73), and "has repeatedly inverted the medical establishment's denouncement
of fat bodies. Contrarily, illness on the series is often equated with weight loss"
(Santo 87). More than once, Tony is shown scolding his formerly chubby teenage son
for his reluctance to eat-a sure sign of the value placed on bodily bulk in Tony's
macho world.
Avi Santo highlights "the show's habitual use of overweight and obese bodies, particularly
among its male characters" (72). Tony Soprano, Pussy Bonpensiero, Bobby Bacala, Skip
Lipari, Jimmy Altieri, and Vito Spatofore surely comprise the fattest ensemble ever
featured on prime time television. "With few exceptions, the male body on The Sopranos
is regularly shown to be soft and unfit. Male fatness on The Sopranos is very rarely
an overt signifier of failure" (72). Instead, fatness is the norm, and the male characters
with whom viewers are asked to identify are rarely slim.
Lest one think that fatness exists purely as a signifier of masculinity on the show,
Tony's fat sister Janice (played by Aida Turturro) is the most interesting female
character whose weight is never flagged, except by scholar-fans who praise her transgressiveness.
Janice's "ability to identify her self-interests and pursue them relentlessly, especially
when coupled with her weight and tight outfits, enables her to transgress in ways
that Carmela [Tony's wife, played by Edie Falco] wouldn't even dream of because of
her continuing commitment to both her shapely and wifely roles" (Donatelli and Alward
67). Janice's most prominent features are not her zaftig belly or ample bosom, but
rather her manipulative manner and scheming ways; she bears none of the be-all/end-all
shame of fatness carried by Ginny. The show seems to suggest that mobsters and mobster
families come in all shapes and sizes, but that a certain aesthetic is expected of
mobster wives-and the failure to meet this standard raises much ire. Although Janice's
fatness is not problematized or made to symbolize her unsavory persona, what does
encourage viewers to read her unsympathetically is our perception that she is feigning
a disability (Epstein-Barr disease, and later Carpal Tunnel Syndrome) and collecting
disability payments as a result.
Ideologies of Disability
So, then, it is imperative to look at the ideologies encoded about fatness and about
amputeeism in the episodes I have chosen. According to Zola, the spatial intimacy
required of television as a medium limits the number of characters who can be seen
acting at the same time. "Thus, television and film directors have been reluctant
to insert an individual with an obvious physical disability into a minor role where
the disability is irrelevant to the story for fear of diverting attention from where
the focus of action should be" (Zola, "Depictions of Disability" 12). Ginny's fatness
drives a key subplot; however, Svetlana's amputeeism is indeed irrelevant to the
story. Attention to her as a minor character, then, suggests a progressive attitude
where Svetlana's form of variation is concerned. Televised representations of amputeeism
are more "high stakes" than those of fatness. Lauri Klobas notes that the celluloid
personas of people with disabilities "are more familiar to society than their real-life
counterparts by warrant of screen repetition" (xi). The increasing ubiquity of fatness
in American culture means that most people know many others who are fat, and that
firsthand knowledge helps to temper the ideological power of reductive representations.
Fewer people know others who have lost a limb, and thus they rely more heavily on
media imagery for cues.
Fortunately, the portrayal of Svetlana in the story line I described earlier is respectable
in that it provided audiences with a view from inside disability. In the introduction
to her thorough catalog of dramatic TV disability representations, Klobas discusses
the problem common to most of them: "Stories are bound to a confining formula treatment
where disability is a personal problem one must overcome. Viewers seldom see disabled
characters as multifaceted human beings for whom physical limitations are a fact
of nature. Disability is not depicted as being integrated into a busy and full life"
(xiii). Though only a minor character, Svetlana avoids this diminished status. Though
Tony tries to frame her as a supercrip for not being "in the bottle" and for making
a website, Svetlana stands for none of that. She goes about her business, working
hard (but not exactly leaping tall buildings in a single bound), loving passionately,
and being a whole person, not some disabled dynamo. Her character's attitude is important
because seeing someone who doesn't mourn their state of difference from a norm makes
us question why we value the norm as much as we do (Hillyer 17).
Ginny, in contrast, is framed even by her loving husband as struggling intensely
to overcome her fatness. In reproaching her own fatness, Ginny embodies the stereotypical
disabled character who carries a "flaw" on her body "but who hides society's and
history's contempt for the disabled person by vocalizing a self-loathing or a self-destructive
pattern" (Hevey 424). Every shot of her in the episode "The Weight" depicts her focused
on weight-changing behavior. She seems to have no other interests. Ginny comes off
as what Jack Nelson describes as a "pitiable victim doomed to an unsatisfying life"
(1). Even John decides Ginny's honor is no longer worth defending when he realizes
that she's not dieting and fighting her weight like he thought she was. Klobas further
argues that disabled characters "require help and aid to regain full personhood status"
(xiv). Svetlana needs no more help in this department than the rest of us. But Ginny
needs her husband's reminder that he thinks she's beautiful in order to be a whole
person again after her candy binge. In terms of social class status, it is also a
lot easier for most viewers to identify with Svetlana than with Ginny. Ginny is a
well-off homemaker with ample resources of time and money, whereas Svetlana lives
a lower middle class life of financial concerns and wage labor. By showing us John's
ultimate decision to not pursue his defense of Ginny's honor in this context, the
writers are signaling that Ginny has the choice to reform herself, but can't or won't-and
thus doesn't deserve the respect accorded to the likes of Svetlana.
Cumberbatch and Negrine question whether television should statistically represent
society (98), and further, what constitutes "positive" imagery (102; see also Hevey
424). Ultimately, what becomes important is not the mere number of representations
but the expression of a view from within disability culture through television-a
view that counters "a history of [disability] representation that was not done by
us but done to us" (Hevey 423). Jack Nelson argues that "disability activists would
like to see an approach that neither denies nor emphasizes the disability portrayed"
(15). Ginny's fatness is indeed overemphasized, so no points there. Furthermore,
her subjectivity-whether her honor is worth fighting for-is made to hinge on how
well she endeavors, through dieting, to undermine the very conditions of her own
existence. But Svetlana manages to emerge victorious here; her one-leggedness is
merely a fact of her existence, neither hidden nor made a big deal of. She emerges
as neither supercrip nor pitiable victim, and thus stands as a politically potent
example of disability represented on television. Given that the oppression of disabled
people has been described as "deriving from the economic relations of production,
the . . . position of 'the flawed body' in western culture and from the anxieties
of the able-bodied about their own position," examples of this type of representation
constitute "a crucial tactic in diminishing the oppression of disabled people" (Hevey
in Fulcher 177).
Another point of contrast in the representations of Ginny and Svetlana comes in their
use of space. Zola contends that "it is increasingly less acceptable to exile problem-bearers
in faraway colonies, asylums, and sanitaria. A recent compromise has been to locate
them in places which if not geographically distant are socially distant" (Missing
Pieces 198). On The Sopranos, nearly every scene featuring either Ginny or Svetlana
is set in domestic space (whether the Sacrimoni manse or Uncle Junior's house)-the
private sphere. These problematic women, while not institutionalized, dwell in spaces
with little public influence. However, a key difference lies in the fact that Ginny
is depicted in her own home, while Svetlana, as a health aide, works in the homes
of others, and thus is presumed to have a greater degree of influence in the public
sphere. In the most important scenes for each of these characters, their location
in space is telling. Svetlana manages to emerge out of the domestic space as she
stands on the porch to tell Tony to buzz off in an act of agency. Ginny stays huddled
in the basement of her home, the very bowels of the private sphere, subjected to
her husband's remonstrations of her sugar lust. Ginny is trapped in the private sphere,
consigned to isolation, anonymity, and shame. But in Svetlana's capacity to transcend
the limitations of the private sphere to which disabled people have been relegated
for too long, The Sopranos gives us a disabled character worthy of emulation.
Lest we become overenthusiastic about such representations, Zola cautions us about
disability success stories, tales of people who have managed to overcome their disability
to accomplish great things, saying that if they "could overcome their handicaps so
could and should all the disabled. And if we fail, it is our problem, our personality
defect, our weakness" (Missing Pieces 205). Furthermore, "to emphasize individual
personal qualities as the reason for success in overcoming difficulties (and the
reason for failure if the barriers prove insurmountable) is self-serving for the
individual and society" (Missing Pieces 235; see also Wendell, The Rejected Body
52). The depiction of Svetlana, who refuses to be made into a hero by Tony, refuses
this logic of individualism, offering instead a more complicated ideology about disability
and agency.
In describing his own father's reaction to his son's unhappiness, Zola claims that
his father viewed him as an ingrate. "Like women, I, a handicapped person, was perceived
as dependent on someone else's largesse for my happiness, or on someone else to let
me achieve it for myself (Missing Pieces 213). This description resonates with Ginny's
attitude about her own fatness, but is a far cry from Svetlana's perspective. In
the scene where Ginny is caught bingeing on candy, she allows her sense of self to
rest on her husband's opinion of her.
Ginny: (through tears) I know I've gained weight these last few years-I see the other
wives, the way men look at them.
John: Don't I look at you like that? (Ginny nods.) Haven't I always? (Ginny nods
again.) It was your idea, all this dieting nonsense.
Ginny: I wanted you to be proud of me!
John: I am proud of you, I love you. (He hugs her.)
(The Sopranos, episode 43: "The Weight")
It is clear that Ginny recognizes the extent to which John has the capacity, with
his mere approval, to rescue her from her imagined fate as an undesirable fat woman.
John's largesse allows Ginny to feel grateful that she can be loved in spite of her
fatness-a problematic rhetoric for a progressive disability politics, indeed.
Asch and Fine highlight the odd dynamic of this type of relationship, wherein the
non-disabled partner is understood as virtuous while the disabled one is cast as
an anchor or a drain. "Disabled women who have partners, especially if they are non-disabled
men, are likely to discover that they and their partners are subjected to curiosity,
scrutiny, and public misunderstanding. Ubiquitously perceived as a social burden,
the disabled woman evokes pity that spreads to her partner ... The public assumption
is that this woman is a burden and her husband is either saintly or a loser himself
(Asch and Fine 245). In fact, John Sacrimoni, despite his murderous gangster ways,
seems downright pious when he defends and cherishes his fat wife. Alien Rucker, in
a glossy coffee table book about the show, describes the relationship between John
and Ginny Sacrimoni in a way that resonates with this perception: "Sack's wife, Ginny,
is a former professional dancer but now suffers from a weight problem ... Weaknesses:
Hard to spot any. A supremely skilled and shrewd operator, adept at exploiting the
Sopranos without offending them. His Achilles' heel could be his wife. Obesity invites
diabetes and other health problems. If she's sick, he'll probably want to be with
her and not up the river, which may be grounds for cooperation" (17). The representation
of Ginny and John's marriage reproduces conservative stereotypes about the function
of disability in interpersonal relationships.
The Sopranos positions Ginny at the nexus of a moral panic about the body as a project.
Despite her apparent embrace of diet rhetoric and lifestyle, her body remains excessive,
markedly not capable of the change (weight loss) that would earn her a cultural seal
of approval. GarlandThomson writes that bodily "plasticity takes on moral dimensions
in a society devoted to the fantasy of self-improvement inflected by the duty to
consume that is characteristic of late capitalism" ("Re-shaping" 3). It is perhaps
her inability to succeed along culturally acceptable lines in the project of her
body that makes Ginny a tragic example of the ideological abject. "Indeed, the tyranny
of slenderness is perhaps the most virulent of the ideologies of beauty used to discipline
and control the female body" (Garland-Thomson, "Re-shaping" 2).5
The only evident way in which Ginny's portrayal is more forward-thinking than Svetlana's
is in their casting. In contrast to the present context in which increasing numbers
of reedy thespians are donning fat suits for dramatic or comedic effect, The Sopranos
makes headway in casting an actual fat woman (as if so few exist!) as Ginny.6 That
she is not a trained actor seems beside the point, unless one considers that a fat
suit would be no good for the show's realism, and serious weight gain for typically
slim actresses is out of the question. Svetlana, as mentioned earlier, is played
by an acclaimed non-disabled Russian actress with the help of digital wizardry. Though
Alia Kliouka very capably enacts Svetlana, for some, the political significance of
casting non-disabled people to play disabled ones parallels the retrograde thinking
behind the minstrel shows of an earlier era.
Though obesity is not widely considered to be a disability in the popular imagination
(despite its inclusion as a protected condition in the Americans With Disabilities
Act), studies suggest that it has more negative connotations than other easily recognized
forms of disability.7 A study by psychologists at Rutgers and the University of Pennsylvania
found that "when 10-11 year old children are asked to rate drawings of children who
are either healthy, obese, or physically handicapped in order of how well they like
the children depicted in the drawings, the children rate the obese youngsters lowest
of all" ("Tween Girls" 12).8 In attempting to explain an increase among girls in
bias against the obese since 1961, the researchers argue that "girls' tendency to
indicate stronger bias against obesity is likely a result of stronger conditioning
from an early age equating beauty with thinness. Indeed, girls as young as six are
concerned about their weight and striving to be thinner" ("Tween Girls" 12; see also
"Body Beautiful/Body Perfect").
My intention is not to enter fatness and amputeeism (or any other form of disability)
into competition for the status of "most reviled embodiment." Instead, the goal is
a recognition of their commonalities. April Herndon argues that failing to recognize
fat people as disabled in effect depoliticizes fatness, an experience marked by oppression
and pathology. "For Fat people who are often already isolated from both mainstream
culture and other disabled people, non-recognition further breaks down group bonds,
isolates us as discrete individuals, and severely hinders the forming of politically
conscious Fat politics" (12).
Like Kim Q. Hall, I am interested in exposing those techniques of normalization that
"subject bodies that deviate from a white, male, class privileged, able-bodied, and
heterosexual norm" to oppression as "a way of understanding the connection between
all forms of oppression" (vii; see also Herndon 2). While I would be surprised if
most six-year old girls were taking their cues from a show as violent and dark as
The Sopranos, these findings nonetheless point to an imperative: our cultural representations
must intervene in the development of these runaway ideologies about body, disability,
and gender so that greater support for and acceptance of human variation ensues.
Herndon argues that "subjected to medicalization and stigmatization, fat women's
bodies must also be represented as sites of power, entitlement, and freedom rather
than loci of fear, misunderstanding, and pity" (16). Alas, in its depiction of Ginny,
The Sopranos accomplishes only the latter; the door remains open for representations
capable of accomplishing the former. Wendell protests that "now it is possible for
the images of a few people to drive out the reality of most people we actually encounter
... This tends to conflate body ideals with our concept of what is physically 'normal,'
increasing the number of people whose bodies are regarded by themselves and others
as abnormal and socially unacceptable" (The Rejected Body 86). What is sorely needed
is a representational universe that begins to approach the complexity and wealth
of real corporeal difference.
As I logged Sopranos episodes for this project, I notice that a transformation began
to take place in my own perceptions. Except for Ginny, whose portrayal I hope to
have sufficiently problematized, fatness is neither obsessed over nor disciplined
on the show. Characters exist with cancer, stroke, Borderline Personality Disorder,
food poisoning, developmental disabilities, depression, panic attacks, Epstein-Barr
disease. Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, sore backs, gunshot wounds to the spleen, Attention
Deficit Disorder, low vision, heroin addiction, learning disabilities, obesity, amputated
legs, and other conditions that are feared or reviled to different degrees in everyday
life. On the show, they're mostly just another fact of life-except, of course, when
they are faked. With its sharp writing and masterful acting. The Sopranos makes physical
limitation, loss of ability, distance from body ideals, and pain comprehensible to
its audience. This accomplishment brings us one step closer to having
less fear of the negative body, less fear of our own weaknesses and 'imperfections,'
of our inevitable deterioration and death. Perhaps we could give up some of our idealizations
and relax our desire for control of the body; until we do, we maintain them at the
expense of people whose bodies do not fit the ideals, and at the expense of much
of everyone's ability to live comfortably with our own real bodies (Wendell, The
Rejected Body 109-110).
The bodies that jar me from my daydream of reality (with its vast repertoire of human
variation) transplanted to television are inhabited by the Bada Bing dancers, all
strangely similar to one another with their collagen-enhanced lips, liposuctioned
hips, and silicone breasts. That kind of physique has been normalized on other shows,
and when it emerges as freakish in contrast to the diversity of human corporeality,
it suggests that The Sopranos is doing interesting representational work about bodies.
-1-
Questia, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning. www.questia.com
Publication Information:
Article Title: Disability, Gender and Difference on the Sopranos. Contributors: Kathleen
Lebesco - author. Journal Title: Women's Studies in Communication. Volume: 29. Issue:
1. Publication Year: 2006. Page Number: 39+. © 2006 Organization for Research on
Women & Communication. Provided by ProQuest LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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Jessie Rayl
thedogmom63 at frontier.com
www.facebook.com/Eaglewings10
www.pathtogrowth.org
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