For the past year and a half, I’ve been enrolled in a graduate program in special education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The classes have been challenging and eye-opening, in part because my professors routinely ask me to reflect on my prejudices as a person without disabilities. In the first class I took for the program, an overview of the history of special education in the U.S., I learned about person-first language, and this shaped how I’ve approached the course material ever since. In brief, person-first language is a way of discussing people with disabilities—or, for that matter, anyone—that foregrounds their identities. Rather than describing a student as “an autistic child,” for example, one would describe him or her as “a child with autism.” This might seem like a simple semantic point, but person-first language can be transformative in how we view others, forcing us to consider their personhood before we think of how they’re affected by physical or mental conditions.
The remainder of A Fantastic Woman concerns Marina’s efforts to reclaim her sense of self after this episode. There are some tender moments where the heroine finds solace with her sister and her boss; as demonstrated by his previous film, Gloria (2013), Lelio is a superb director of actors, and he’s especially talented at conveying intimacy between characters who know each other well. The film even achieves a certain exuberance when Marina goes to a dance club and tries to lose herself in the scene. As she momentarily forgets about Orlando and the pain his relatives have caused her, Marina finds herself in a new costume performing a choreographed number with about a dozen other people. It’s a hard-won celebration of Marina’s right to be herself.
