Abstract
This article rereads Lee Chang‐dong's 2002 film Oasis (South Korea) from a feminist disability media studies perspective. It begins with Lee's recent revelation that his sister's lived experience inspired its narrative. That inspiration, inflected by regional (South Korean and Asian) cultural priorities that emphasize family, shapes Oasis's distinctive but underrecognized intervention in global disability media studies. The film anticipates and creatively implements the critical principles of non‐ableist representation formulated more than a decade later, while also engaging deeply fraught questions concerning gender, sexuality, disability, and sexual violence. Constructed around two differently gendered, disabled protagonists, the film's non‐ableist narrative and looking relations affectively situate audiences and critics within a three‐pronged inquiry: how are fantasy, capacity, and consent privileges of the abled? The film's coupling unfolds answers by foregrounding the gendered illegibility of disabled desire, capacity, and looking relations in abled personal (domestic/family), social (restaurants, transit), and legal (police station/prison) contexts in Seoul, South Korea. It demonstrates how that illegibility affects the protagonists’ access to and expressions of care, autonomy, consent, and love. While interpretations of Oasis have typically focalized the male protagonist, this reading begins and ends, as does the film, with her. The intersectional meanings the film generates from the female protagonist's perspective accommodate a different story, making of her sensibilities, acuity, and imagination the oasis referenced by the film's title.
