MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

This paper focuses on “Timmy,” the first recurring character with a visible disability on the animated series *South Park *(1998 – ). Timmy uses an electric wheelchair, wears corrective shoes, verbally communicates by saying only his first name, and twists his neck and bobs his head incessantly while performing in a local heavy metal band.

Disability scholars Michael Chemers and Hioni Karamanos read Timmy’s performance as a “double move” (2011), which nurtures and critiques the oppressive structures of ableism. They posit Timmy, when singing and dancing onstage, moves from tragically to triumphantly disabled in the eyes of the audience. Though generative, this proliferation of the disabled performer as ‘doubled’ traps the individual into existing as two fixed, opposing ideas for the sake of how an audience feels. It does not, I insist, account for the agency of the performer with disabilities onstage and in everyday life, live or animated.

In contrast, I read Timmy’s performance, specifically as the lead singer of the metal band “Lords of the Underworld,” as an animated choreography that accounts for a myriad of movements. Rather than move in two directions I argue how Timmy, a disabled performer, instead twists, or rather, oscillates around discursive frameworks of meaning through distinct and culturally situated animated movements. These oscillations bring Timmy to a place of potential that wheels past the parameters set by the animated audience in South Park, as well as the theorization imposed onto him in disability studies and cultural studies literature. Utilizing popular dance scholar Sherril Dodds’s (2011) work subcultural dance performance, disability studies scholar Donna Reeve’s (2009) reading of Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer (1998), and Alison Kafer’s (2013) concept of “queer futurity,” I demonstrate how Timmy’s animated oscillations foster a revised approach to reading and writing disability in performance