Disability and the Media

Dear Colleagues,

One key aspect of disability representation in literature and film is the prolific nature of physical, sensory, and cognitive differences so central to characterization and narrativity. If one excludes literature and film from the category “Disability and the Media”, a much different picture may emerge. Disabled people appear as objects of inspiration (inspiration porn) and as the unspecified casualties of living lives that are increasingly subject to the ravages of climate change, economic dispossession, wars, famines, and as the all-purpose recipients of care that enables the celebration of caregivers and other cultural heroes while evacuating the particularities of life for disabled persons themselves. As a prior historical moment of being locked out gives way to a more celebratory moment of the embrace of disabled people as moral barometers for the modernity of nations (we even care for our disabled people!), we find neoliberalism offering rhetorical shelters of inclusion while disability continues to engender widespread social disenfranchisement. For example, European governments have cut supports for disabled people while raiding coffers specifically designated for disability supports to underwrite the smooth functioning of businesses and government shortfalls; in the US, government leaders refer to disability social policy as “the gold standard of the world” while still not ratifying the UN’s Declaration on the Rights of Disabled Persons. Such resistance comes on the heels of an unwillingness to allow other nations to peer into the West and critique its self-serving claims as “the gold standard” of accessibility. Likewise, on social media, disabled persons report being bullied, threatened, and heavily stigmatized by those who find non-normativity “uncomfortable”. This Special Issue is open to analyses of all forms of disability and the media. How does media conform and/or continue to stigmatize and erase from view the material lives of disabled people? How have disabled people used the increasingly democratic economic accessibility of video and cell phone technology to tell their stories from their own points of view? How do we theorize the interplay of an increasingly digitized prosthetics and support industry with the rapid pace of technology in general? Is there a new eugenics surfacing where able-body identifications among the populace condition acquiesce to allowing some less-desirable demographics to be sacrificed so the rest can live? How can media capture the gradual generational violence of slow death and the alternative environmentalism of disabled people in poverty?

Prof. Dr. David T. Mitchell
Dr. Sharon Lynn Snyder
Guest Editors

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• disability
• media studies
• neoliberalism
• inclusionism
• human rights
• social model
• new eugenics
• neo-materialism
• digital activism
• inspiration porn
• social disenfranchisement