What is it about?
Using sources from a wide variety of print and digital media, this book discusses the need for ample and healthy portrayals of disability and neurodiversity in the media, as the primary way that most people learn about conditions. It contains 13 newly written chapters drawing on representations of disability in popular culture from film, television, and print media in both the Global North and the Global South, including the United States, Canada, India, and Kenya. Although disability is often framed using a limited range of stereotypical tropes such as victims, supercrips, or suffering patients, this book shows how disability and neurodiversity are making their way into more mainstream media productions and publications with movies, television shows, and books featuring prominent and even lead characters with disabilities or neurodiversity. Disability Representation in Film, TV, and Print Media will be of interest to all scholars and students of disability studies, cultural studies, film studies, gender studies, and sociology more broadly.
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Photo by Felix Mooneeram on Unsplash
Why is it important?
"Representation matters for many reasons, not the least of which is because representation is a powerful way marginalized groups can gain access to our media-saturated society. For many of us, media representations are the only window we have into many aspects of the world and the different groups and cultures of people who live in it. If marginalized groups are not sufficiently represented, they remain invisible to the masses. If they are not accurately and genuinely represented, the masses will continue to misunderstand them, be unaware of their rights, promote harmful stereotypes, and act in discriminatory ways" (from "Introduction," p. 4).
Perspectives
The Table of Contents: Introduction Michael S. Jeffress 1. Parasocial contact effects and a disabled actor in Speechless Lingling Zhang and Beth Haller 2. Women with disability: Sex object and supercrip stereotyping on reality television’s Push Girls Donnalyn Pompper and Krystan Holtzthum 3. A critical examination of the intersection of sexuality and disability in Special, a Netflix series Adam Davies, Kimberly Maich, Christina Belcher, Elaine Cagulada, Madeleine DeWelles, and Tricia van Rhijn 4. Euphemistic processes on the MDA Show of Strength Telethon, 2012-2014: The Post-Jerry Lewis years Emily Stones 5. Hegemonic constructions and corporeal deviance in portrayals of physically disabled women characters on Saturday Night Live Kristen Hungerford 6. Inspiring people or perpetuating stereotypes?: The complicated case of disability as inspiration Leah Cameron, Irena Knezevic, and Roy Hanes 7. The patronized supercrip: A textual analysis of The Peanut Butter Falcon Shelby E. Landmark 8. How Silence Rhetorically Constructs Deafness in A Quiet Place: The Silent Treatment Sarah Mayberry Scott 9. The communication of disability through children’s media: Potential, problems, and potential problems Madeleine DeWelles 10. Discursive representations of disability in children’s picture books on disabled parents Ameera Ali 11. An interrogation of select Indian literary works through disability discourse: Loud yet unheard Anil K. Aneja and Shilpa B S L 12. Abuse and/as disability in Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s Dirty River: How to speak without words Anna M. Moncada Storti 13. Media, culture, and news framing of disability in Kenya’s Daily Nation newspaper Mauryne Abwao and Suman Mishra
Dr Michael S Jeffress
Medical University of the Americas
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This page is a summary of: Disability Representation in Film, TV, and Print Media, June 2021, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.4324/9781003035114.
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