Disability and Popular Culture

Focusing Passion, Creating Community and Expressing Defiance

Katie Ellis

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317150367
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Social Sciences
• Categoría: Popular Culture

As a response to real or imagined subordination, popular culture reflects the everyday experience of ordinary people and has the capacity to subvert the hegemonic order. Drawing on central theoretical approaches in the field of critical disability studies, this book examines disability across a number of internationally recognised texts and objects from popular culture, including film, television, magazines and advertising campaigns, children's toys, music videos, sport and online spaces, to attend to the social and cultural construction of disability. While acknowledging that disability features in popular culture in ways that reinforce stereotypes and stigmatise, Disability and Popular Culture celebrates and complicates the increasing visibility of disability in popular culture, showing how popular culture can focus passion, create community and express defiance in the context of disability and social change. Covering a broad range of concerns that lie at the intersection of disability and cultural studies, including media representation, identity, the beauty myth, aesthetics, ableism, new media and sport, this book will appeal to scholars and students interested in the critical analysis of popular culture, across disciplines such as disability studies, sociology and cultural and media studies.

Chapter 1
Introduction: Producerly Disability

In November 2010 Steve Tucker, a public servant working in the Australian Capital Territory, sent an email to 7,000 of his government department co-workers trying to track down a woman he’d met on a night out with colleagues. The email read in part:

She left a strong and positive impression on me. Unfortunately, people got in the way after we met and I didn’t get to finish our meeting how I wanted to. This has been bugging me ever since. If you can kindly let [her] know that I would like to get in contact with her or alternatively get in touch with myself, I will be very appreciative. (Tucker cited in johnboy, 2010)

He concluded the email with the assertion that ‘life is too short for regret’. As Australians sighed a collective ‘what a sleaze’, we thought we had him all figured out. Tucker was compared to Napoléon, Romeo, and Patrick Moberg, the 21-year-old who enlisted the help of the blogosphere in 2007 to track down a girl he was too shy to talk to on the train. We rolled our eyes at Tucker’s attempt to locate the ‘tall and olive skinned [Olivia]’ while the email was forwarded on to a further 22 million people. So close to Christmas, it was a slow news week and, as Tucker’s motives were voraciously debated around water coolers, on breakfast television and in the comments section of online newspapers, he went into hiding.

Then, just as the story was all but dead, Tucker emailed journalist and blogger Sam de Brito to tell ‘his side’. His side changed everything. Steve Tucker, wasn’t just some guy, he had cerebral palsy – he was disabled. His response to the media attention detailed experiences of bullying, teenaged angst, early 20s’ uncertainty, romantic rejection, self-sabotage and a more recent state of awareness and insight. He was trying to track down Olivia as part of a broader project on himself and how he approached life. The email he sent to his colleagues was not about ‘picking up’ it was about social constructions of life, gender and disability:

… about people dealing with disability; those who cannot communicate their suffering and the families that care for these people tirelessly. It is about telling peer pressure to go f--- itself. It’s childish behaviour and it impacts our adult lives in ways we don’t see. It is about gender stereotypes (both of them) and social conditioning. It is about mental health and getting help if needed. It is about telling people what they mean to us while life is good. Not when a personal crisis hits. Tomorrow isn’t a guarantee for any of us. It is about standing up to society and illustrating that it has lost its way. We live in a culture of fear. Society had dimmed my spirit for long enough. (Tucker cited in de Brito, 2010)

This was a media-literate response. Tucker evaluated both the media narrative around his email as well as, further back, towards representations of masculinity and disability in general to produce a new critique. While his focus on internalising and overcoming socially disabling pressures could be read as further evidence of the individualisation of disability, he provided a perspective on disability as subject to social and cultural pressures that was unique to Australian media and culture.

Like race, class, gender and sexuality, disability is a pervasive image in media and popular culture and a provocative topic among philosophers, theorists, academics and bloggers. Disability and Popular Culture attends to the dominance of images of disability in popular culture as a site of cultural politics. This book covers a broad range of subjects, texts, and concerns that lie at the intersection of disability and cultural studies, including media representation, identity, the beauty myth, aesthetics, ableism, new media, children’s toys and sport.

Disability, Society and Culture

While, for many, disability can be explained in a straightforward way using medical discourses, critical disability theorists recognise that disability is both socially and culturally constructed. Social and cultural models of disability have emerged in response to the dominating medicalisation of disability as a personal problem to overcome. Critical approaches to disability are often described as emerging concurrently on either side of the Atlantic, in the UK and US, each with slightly different focus. Whereas the UK model leveraged that country’s tradition of the labour movement and focused on issues related to employment, the US critical disability approach was heavily influenced by gains made within civil rights.

The Social Model

To begin in the UK, the field is dominated by the ‘social model of disability’. This model sees disability as the restriction of social activity imposed on top of people that have impairments and is very much concerned with access to the workforce. Prominent UK social model activist Vic Finkelstein (1981) proposed three stages of disability which were closely tied to the employment possibilities of particular epochs. The first stage of disability occurred during the feudal era where people with disability worked within and were cared for by the family unit. Hand-built machinery could be modified to suit variations in bodies and adaptive technology was not unusual. Then, with the advent of the industrial revolution, the concept of able-bodied normality was established as work expectations shifted towards interchangeable bodies who could come in and out of the production line without need for variation in machinery. It was during the second stage that disability was medicalised as institutions caring for the disabled and insane were established and people with disability were removed from public view and placed into these institutions. Finally, Finkelstein proposed a third stage of disability where new information technologies would allow the disabled to re-enter the workforce, again through the use of adaptive technologies.

The social model of disability has been integral in raising awareness of disability as subject to socially created oppression; however, it has also been accused of neglecting cultural imagery, certain personal experiences and the impacts of impairment. The social model proposed a clear distinction between disability as a form of socially created oppression and impairment as existing in the body, and also binarised the distinction between the medical model and social model of disability. As Tom Shakespeare (2006) argues, a number of critiques of disability (more than I am able to fully elaborate on in this brief introduction) which proceeded from a social oppression framework emerged around the same time as the social model but did not necessarily insist on these overt political distinctions. Many of these approaches recognise the relevance of impairment while still foregrounding disability as a subject to social-contextual factors.

The Cultural Model

US critical theorists David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder (2006) proposed a ‘cultural model of disability’ in an attempt to ‘incorporate both the outer and inner reaches of culture and experience as a combination of profoundly social and biological forces’ (p. 7). They saw disability as an intricate ‘phenomenological value that is not purely synonymous with the process of social disablement’ (p. 6). Although the strict distinction between disability and impairment is not overt within US cultural models of disability, ‘the overarching orientation is social and cultural, not medical or individualist’ (Shakespeare, 2006, p. 25).

Mitchell and Snyder (2000) outline the ways cultural representations of disability have been approached by disability theorists to identify a progression of analysis through a number of areas of focus. In a similar fashion to many identity based areas of enquiry, cultural analysis began with the recognition of stereotypes. For Mitchel and Snyder this approach can be divided into ‘negative imagery’ which identifies and categorises damaging reoccurring stereotypes of disability and ‘social realist’ approaches designed to counter these caricatures of disability which are considered to be ‘inaccurate and misleading’ (p. 21). Their next two categories – ‘new historicism’ and ‘biographical criticism’ – also work in concert. New historicism recognises that images of disability emerge in the context of particular eras and cultures. In this way, positive and negative imagery comes to be understood as context-specific and always in a process of construction. Authors with disability have been actively sought out by disability theorists as part of this historical revisionism. A number of disabled, deformed and ill authors have been identified and their works interrogated for what they reveal about the relationship between literature and medicine for example. Finally, ‘transgressive reappropriation’ recognises the potential for cultural subversion in images of disability which may be considered negative. They recommend critical theorists undertake a consideration of how disability works as a narrative prosthesis in popular media and culture. For Mitchell and Snyder, a ‘narrative prosthetics’ functions as:

… a character-making trope in the writer’s arsenal, as a social category of deviance, as a symbolic vehicle for meaning-making and cultural critique, and as an option in the narrative negotiation of disabled subjectivity. (Snyder and Mitchell, 2000, p. 1)

It is clear that disability functioned as a narrative prosthesis – or a prop to structure and support the story – in the Steve Tucker story. Whereas initially Tucker was framed as an overly enthusiastic young man enjoying the night life and abusing his workplace email system, once he revealed the disability connection he became an inspirational young man triumphing over adversary. His response also leveraged this common cultural narrative (prosthesis) to shift perceptions. The disability connection gave this story depth and meaning and took the ‘life is too short’ mantra to another level. It also troubled our initial interpretation and broader cultural understanding of masculinity, disability, how we treat other people, and the media’s quick rush to judgement.

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson offers a particularly useful framework for understanding disability that I will draw on throughout this book:

Disability has four aspects: first, it is a system for interpreting bodily variations; second, it is a relation between bodies and their environments; third, it is a set of practices that produce both the able-bodied and the disabled; fourth, it is a way of describing the inherent instability of the embodied self. (Garland-Thomson, 2002, p. 74)

The experience of disability is therefore shaped by social and cultural factors. However, despite Mitchell and Snyder’s observations, it is often claimed that the image of disability in media and culture has not changed (see Darke, 2004; Gerber, 2012; Longmore, 1987). Yet, a number of social and cultural changes have taken place to improve the social position of people with disability since disability in media and culture came to the attention of disability academics and activists. For example, throughout the 1990s, changes in legislation on an international scale were attempting to make society a more equitable place for people with disability. An emerging disability rights movement challenged the idea that disability was an individual’s problem and forced a disabling society to take some responsibility. As a result of the politicisation of disability and the emergence of a disability culture movement, the image of disability in popular culture began to change during the 1990s and 2000s. Where previously disability was used as an exit strategy to kill off characters in soap operas, there are now permanent characters and cast members with disability. Due to the success of the Paralympics Games (and the popularity of the documentary film Murderball), disabled sports are becoming mainstream. Other important developments include the introduction of children’s toys that have disabilities to the mainstream toy market and the inclusion of disability in magazine and music video discourses of beauty.

The Game of Thrones character Tyrion Lannister has some particularly useful observations that derive from both social and cultural models of disability and reflect changing attitudes around disability oppression and inclusion in popular culture. As a dwarf, Tyrion faces prejudice from the society in which he lives and is constantly devalued by his father, Tywin, who resents him for his disability and his mother’s death in childbirth. Tywin describes wanting to carry Tyrion into the sea and ‘let the waves wash [him] away’, variously calling him a ‘stunted fool’, and ‘an ill-made, spiteful little creature full of envy, lust, and low cunning’. Although Tywin constantly reminds Tyrion of his socially devalued qualities, Tyrion displays intellect, compassion, loyalty, bravery and wit. His compassion extends to rival family the Starks as he encourages second son Bran to use modified stirrups to ride a horse after he acquires a spinal injury. He also offers illegitimate son Jon Snow advice on how to deal with other people’s prejudice: ‘Let me give you some advice, bastard: Never forget what you are. The rest of the world will not. Wear it like armour, and it can never be used to hurt you.’ As Tyrion explains that ‘all dwarves are bastards in their father’s eyes’, his encouragement of Jon Snow becomes a statement about disability rights and inclusion that although set in another time and place has clear resonance today. Game of Thrones features a number of characters with disability and develops them as complex people with strengths and weaknesses.

Throughout this book I seek to bring together social and cultural models of disability to explore the presence of disability in popular culture and consider the ways popular culture reflects social change, debates pertinent issues and, indeed, is pleasurable. As I discuss throughout this book, disability features prominently in popular culture, including in film, television, toys, sport, advertising, and music video, as a central cultural identity and category. Sometimes, as is commonly the case with Game of Thrones, the disability relevance is overlooked, even while clear and direct statements are made about disability inclusion.

In their landmark collection of essays on popular culture Hop on Pop, Henry Jenkins, Tara McPherson and Jane Shattac (2002) observe that one of the challenges in engaging with popular culture for populations who have historically been excluded from production and representation is the question of how to ‘acknowledge the pleasures they have derived from engaging with popular culture as well as their rage and frustration about its silences, exclusions and assaults on their lives’ (p. 10). This is a useful starting point for thinking about disability and popular culture because, as the social model recognises, people with disabilities have been excluded from production and representation (see Barnes, 1992; Darke, 2004; Hevey, 1992), yet research and even online activity suggests people with disabilities gain pleasure from popular culture. These pleasures open a space for critical engagement. As popular culture and popular memory theorist Tara Brabazon maintains, popular culture offers people a sense of identity and group cohesion:

Popular culture allows audiences to make sense of their lives, when the structures and truths of families, governments and the workplace contradict experiences. Film, television and popular music have a transformative impact on cultural groups, creating enthusiastic audiences who are able to mark out and claim their differences. (Brabazon, 2004, p. 21)

Brabazon’s observations emerge from a particular tradition of the study of popular culture, a framework that has not been embraced by some sectors of critical disability studies.

Popular Culture

At the same time that the concept of able-bodied normality was being established in the second phase of disability, the same cultural shift impacted on the creation and interpretation of popular culture when class distinctions emerged through the ‘new work relations of industrial capitalism’ (Storey, 2003, p. 16). As a result, a clear distinction emerged between popular culture produced for and enjoyed by the masses, and high culture as ‘the best that has been thought and known in the world’ (Arnold, 2006, p. xxii). In simple terms, this is a division between high art and popular culture, a division still operating today.

The Marxist-inspired Frankfurt School of cultural studies proceeded from this line of enquiry. Notably, intellectuals Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1972) are scathing in their assessment of popular culture as ‘business’ and ‘not art’. They rejected the notion that people spontaneously choose culture. Instead, they argue that culture is an industry which employs capitalist means of coercion to manipulate people into continually consuming. Adorno and Horkheimer (1972) claim that popular culture, through its appeal to the masses, creates cultural dupes and citizens who become re-enslaved to the ideology of capitalism through their dependence on it. They argue that the ‘absolute power of capitalism’ (p. 120) is stamped onto magazines, films, radio, even architecture. The audience is coerced into insisting that the same ideology which enslaves them is constantly reproduced, a practice with which producers are happy to oblige.

This discussion reveals the ways popular culture is regarded as both inferior to high culture and as the originator of a number of social problems. In short, the audience is considered passive and the solution is to value elite forms of art as culturally superior. This is a position that has been taken up by several disability theorists who proceed from a social model perspective. For example, in his seminal book The Politics of Disablement, Michael Oliver (1990) argued people with disability are never presented as ordinary people with ordinary problems in popular culture, always emerging as superheroes, villains or tragic individuals. Sheila Riddell and Nick Watson (2003) use Oliver’s 1990 observation to reject criticisms that the social model has not adequately engaged with culture and cultural theorists. They posit that the social model’s unwillingness to draw on cultural studies – with its more recent focus on active audiences and shifting identities – was related to connections Oliver identified between cultural imagery which individualised and medicalised disability, and a similar focus he saw operating in ‘the professions’ and which he highlighted in his early work (see Oliver, 1990; Riddell and Watson, 2003).

However, recognition of the impact of cultural imagery and narratives has gradually increased from a disability perspective. As discussed, analysis began with the recognition of stereotypes. For example Barnes, Mercer and Shakespeare (1999) see the representation of disability and what it means to be disabled as being communicated through damaging stereotypes. The processes of producing meanings of normality mean disabled people are ‘different’. Like Oliver, Barnes et al.’s (1999) comment that people with disability are most often represented as not powerful, nor attractive, or their impairment is a metaphor for evil.

Positive versus Negative Stereotypes

The idea of positive versus negative stereotypes of disability has been discussed within the social model of disability and similarly within media guidelines. However, as critics have pointed out, positive stereotypes are equally as constructed a...