Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
18th International IDEA Conference, Ankara, Türkiye, 13 - 15 Mayıs 2026, ss.18, (Özet Bildiri)
William Gibson’s The Miracle Worker (1965), a play about Helen Keller, an American author, educator, and deafblind activist, dramatises the early period of her life, focusing on the process through which she begins to communicate with the help of her teacher Anne Sullivan. This paper argues that, although the play appears to promote public awareness of disability by presenting key scenes from the life of a disabled individual, at a deeper level it reproduces the ideology of the medical model and recirculates disability within a framework of individual tragedy. The medical model defines disability as a personal deficit that requires correction, while the social model focuses on the social and environmental barriers that produce disability. The play encourages the reader’s pity by seemingly celebrating Keller’s journey from isolation into language and communication. In doing so, it represents her deafblindness primarily as a private catastrophe that requires rescue. At the same time, the play erases the structural conditions that sustain her exclusion, such as the family’s failure to learn alternative modes of communication, and it largely suppresses Anne Sullivan’s own visual impairment, recasting her as an apparently able-bodied saviour. In doing so, The Miracle Worker converts Keller into an inspirational figure commonly described as a “supercrip”, while ignoring her later career as a writer and activist, and ultimately reaffirms a narrative in which disability is imagined as something to be overcome through individual effort rather than through systemic and collective social change.