Disabled girlhood and flexible exceptionalism in HBO's: Miss you can do it

In this article, I analyze critically Miss You Can Do It, an HBO documentary that follows the contestants and their families in a pageant for disabled girls. I explore disabled girls' affective labor as happy objects and trace how certain exceptional, disabled girls are, in Puar's sense, recapacitated and enfolded into the national imaginary. Through an analysis of the storyline of Alina Hollis's adoption as a disabled foreign child, I illustrate how her transnational adoptee status functions in the service of a new, flexible family structure-one that is benevolent, recapacitated by its valuation of disability, and unwaveringly American.