Motionless: Disability and Snow White in Narratives of the Crisis

• Autores: Emily Difilippo
• Localización: The Routledge Hispanic studies companion to twentieth and twenty-first century Spain: ideas, practices, imaginings / coord. por Eduardo Ledesma, Luisa Elena Delgado, 2025, ISBN 978-1-032-96468-3, págs. 403-413
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • The figure of Snow White, first conjured in medieval European folk tales, has since inspired innumerable print and media iterations across various cultures. This chapter studies two versions of the Snow White tale that emerged in Spain during the years of the global economic crisis: Belén Gopegui’s 2007 novel, El padre de Blancanieves (The Father of Snow White) and Pablo Berger’s 2012 film, Blancanieves (Snow White). The author reads the legend of Snow White as a story of disability, caused by a paralyzing poison that banishes the heroine to the margins of society. Following Julie Minich’s assertion that the able body often symbolizes a nation that is healthy and whole, the author proposes disability as a tool for interrogating hegemonic concepts of nationhood and citizenship.These works, by presenting alternative forms of community, provide compelling insights into a cultural moment when the stagnation of capital left the Spanish economy incapacitated. El padre de Blancanieves calls upon its implicitly “normal,” middle-class interlocutors to recognize their obligation toward more vulnerable members of society, including immigrants and those with disabilities. Berger, in his film, places the quadriplegic body of a wounded bullfighter in 1920s Andalucía, inspiring reflection upon traditional ideas of Spanishness that suggest a binary between the able-bodied and the disabled citizen. As a tale that is at once culturally familiar while also deviating from reality, Snow White inspires the imagination of collective bonds that oppose the ideology of capitalist competition that has led to crisis.