Medicine Is Magical and Magical Is Art
Medicine Is Magical and Magical Is Art
Liberation and Overcoming in The Boy in the Plastic Bubble
This chapter analyzes the representations of “real” bubble boys, David Vetter III and Ted DeVita, alongside the movie The Boy in the Plastic Bubble (1976). News stories and movies about the bubble boy linked sexual exploration with space exploration, as well as manly self-sacrifice with self-making. Hence, the boy has been a figure through which Americans negotiated ambivalence about technology, masculinity, and sexuality in a new sexually liberated world. In particular, the representation of his “disabled martyrdom” showed how two conjoined rehabilitative narratives—“overcoming sexual repression” and “overcoming disability,”—had become co-constitutive expectations of adolescence, such that adulthood was represented as the achievement of heterosexuality and able-bodied masculinity.
Keywords: bubble boys, David Vetter III, Ted DeVita, sexual exploration, space exploration, manly self-sacrifice, self-making, heterosexuality
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