Challenging normalcy through stardom: childhood celebrity, disability, and Patty Duke’s Helen Keller

Abstract

ABSTRACT What is it about girl stars, from Shirley Temple to Jodie Foster, that intensely and ambivalently capture the cultural imagination? I argue that child stars, often described as transitioning into adulthood too quickly or staying too long in childhood, challenge damaging social norms of bodily and behavioural development in ways that are sympathetic to disability experience. I use disability studies’ theory of ‘crip time’ and Kathryn Bond Stockton’s notion of the political potential of children ‘growing sideways’ alongside the case study of Patty Duke to demonstrate this productive subversiveness. Duke’s star persona, centred on her portrayal of the young deaf, blind, and uncommunicative Helen Keller in William Gibson’s Broadway play and Arthur Penn’s subsequent film, reveals the parallel developmental non-normativity of disability and child stardom.Through contradictory primary and paratextual evidence surrounding The Miracle Worker and Duke’s stardom, the application of crip time to notions of childhood celebrity, and a contextual understanding of public discourse surrounding childhood during the 1960s, I find that Duke and her characterisation of Keller embody a rejection of conventional understandings of ‘growing up’. Duke’s ambivalent childhood celebrity fractures the constructed ideal of normal development, revealing possibilities for valuable experience beyond the pressures of ableist notions of linear growth.