As Good As It Gets: Queer Theory and Critical Disability

Robert McRuer’s essay does not simply place ableism and heterosexism side by side as two forms of prejudice. It asks how they jointly define the person who appears whole, desirable, and entitled to a future. Starting from queer theory’s critique of heterosexuality as an unmarked norm, McRuer argues that able-bodiedness can be even harder to see as a norm because it passes as nature itself. Compulsory able-bodiedness does not only exclude particular bodies; it also demands that people demonstrate adaptability, productivity, independence, and recovery from crisis. McRuer makes this argument concrete through a close reading of the 1997 film As Good As It Gets.

The essay’s key analytic is “flexibility.” Flexibility can sound like openness and inclusion, but McRuer gives it a double edge. The protagonist may adapt through a crisis and return to social order; marginalized characters, meanwhile, are expected to flexibly assist that transformation and then recede from the story’s center. Read through the film’s heterosexual romantic resolution, this structure makes Simon’s queer identity and disability after an assault, and Carol’s son Spence’s chronic care needs, conditions through which Melvin and Carol meet, grow closer, and change. Difference becomes visible, but visibility does not guarantee an equal claim to the future the ending promises its central couple.

Care makes that imbalance material rather than merely symbolic. Carol organizes her life around Spence’s breathing and medical needs, and his care interrupts her work. Melvin pays for medical help and enters Carol’s life through looking after Simon’s dog, visiting Simon, and accompanying him to Baltimore. McRuer’s reading links intimacy to who carries the time, feeling, and practical work that make other people’s lives possible. Melvin’s generosity need not be dismissed as false; the film more readily turns it into evidence of his growth and likability, while Carol’s sustained caregiving can remain part of the background. The feminist question is not only who cares, but whose care enables whom to become the protagonist—and whether caregivers and care recipients retain desires and narrative lives of their own after that transformation is complete.

McRuer also traces how the film draws a boundary between normal and abnormal. Its opening rituals—Melvin’s repeated locking, hand-washing, and avoidance of pavement cracks—quickly mark him as isolated from ordinary social life; a psychiatric diagnosis then appears as an explanation for his conduct. McRuer argues that the film repeatedly links Melvin’s obsessive-compulsive symptoms with his prejudice, encouraging viewers to read disability and moral failure as naturally connected. This is not a denial that Melvin’s racist, sexist, and homophobic behavior harms others, nor a clinical claim about OCD. It is a critique of the representational link the narrative makes between distinct things. In the ending, Melvin forgets to lock the door and walks into a bakery with Carol; his bodily “flexibility” and heterosexual resolution arrive together, as if returning to normality were proof of becoming a better person.

The essay has a clear historical scope. It analyzes one mainstream U.S. romantic comedy of the late 1990s, not audience responses or the whole range of queer and disabled life. McRuer notices Frank Sachs as a Black queer character, but the essay’s sustained analysis centers more on able-bodiedness and heterosexuality; readers can ask whether the film’s racialized distribution of roles receives enough attention. McRuer also distinguishes experiences the film and its reading place in relation: Simon’s impairment follows an assault, Spence has ongoing health needs, and Melvin’s obsessive-compulsive symptoms meet diagnosis and stigma differently. Folding them into a single abstract category of “difference” would erase their material distinctions.

For readers now, the essay’s sharpest warning is that inclusion does not necessarily redistribute power. A story may bring queer and disabled people into view, even celebrate diversity, while assigning them the work of educating a protagonist, providing care, or proving that he has changed. McRuer closes by identifying points of connection between queer and disability movements as political work against norms and for subjecthood. FemRes pairs the essay with Alison Kafer’s Feminist, Queer, Crip, which develops feminist disability politics, care, and futurity, and with Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s Feminist Disability Studies, a broader map of the field. These are editorial reading connections, not claims of direct influence between the works.