Disability and Biomediation

The medical mediation of bodily differences can be fraught, and many scholars have shown how the combination of media and medicine can produce disablement according to biopolitical norms. Mack Hagood proposes a framework for the study of biomediation that disentangles medical uses of media technologies from the medical model of disability. Using tinnitus as his case study, he demonstrates the value of this framework for understanding the complex role of media in both biological and political struggles over disability and disabled identities.

Any Day Now

Robert McRuer considers how the film Any Day Now (Travis Fine, 2012) may serve as a model for bringing concerns about disability and immigration into conversations about contemporary homonormativity. Queer scholars’ and activists’ critiques of homonormativity, often characterized by the fight for gay marriage and adoption rights, rest on its mainstreaming goals, and its erasure of alternative forms of kinship and community. McRuer reads Any Day Now as resisting homonormativity through its presentation of modes of crip desire, desiring togetherness in and through embodied differences.

“It’s Not Just Sexism”

D. Travers Scott and Meagan Bates analyze television advertisements for anti-anxiety medications in order to explore the status of anxiety as a disability. Through close textual analysis, informed by Foucauldian theory and political economy, they demonstrate the intricate ways that femininity, disability, and normalization inflect and reinforce each other in contemporary discourses around mental health. These ads do not merely target women, they argue, but in fact construct femininity itself as inherently pathological and in need of medical intervention. At the same time, however, parodies of these ads reveal resistance to their pathologizing tropes and point the way toward greater appreciation for neurodiversity.

Prosthetic Heroes

Ellen Samuels examines Iron Man 3 (Shane Black, 2013), arguing that this film’s representations of veterans and disability reflected the social context in which increasing numbers of disabled veterans were returning to the U.S., with their futures uncertain. Drawing on veterans’ longstanding cultural roles as “heroes” or “villains,” this superhero film ultimately positions cure as both violent and mandatory, suggesting little cultural tolerance for veterans’ ongoing disabilities (specifically, PTSD and amputations) and the resources that such conditions would require. Bringing a disability studies reading to a Hollywood blockbuster, this chapter demonstrates the pervasiveness and power of disability narratives.

After School Special Education

In her analysis of ABC’s After School Specials (1972–1995), Julie Passanante Elman argues that disability was central to television's "turn toward relevance" and its construction of the "teen viewer." The Specials represented coming of age by consistently linking heterosexuality with able-bodiedness and metaphorically representing adolescence as a process of “overcoming disability.” Simultaneously, they redefined both teen television viewing and teen sexuality as productive rather than damaging. Articulating insights from disability studies to television studies, Elman demonstrates how the Specials’ disability narratives negotiated the complex terrain of teen sexuality, representations of disability, and an assertion of commercial television’s educational value.

Afterword II

Mara Mills and Jonathan Sterne, leading scholars of media technologies who have long incorporated disability into their analyses, propose “dismediation” as one avenue for the cross-pollination of media and disability studies. Referencing current scholarship in both fields, and engaging with a rich tradition of critical media studies, they argue that “dismediation” understands disability and media as mutually constitutive and thus enables new directions for the study of media and technologies.

Afterwords I

Notable disability studies scholar Rachel Adams reviews the conversation staged in this volume, and identifies several features of the collection that point the way toward a disability media studies: the fruitful interplay between textual and non-textual approaches, the modeling of new forms of intersectionality, and the value of considering the specificity of media forms through the lens of disability. DMS, she argues, could benefit from more attention to historical media forms and non-Anglophone global media.

The Price of the Popular Media Is Paid by the Effluent Citizen

An important shared interest of disability studies and media studies is the materiality of media and its consequences for differently situated subjects. Basing his analysis in Mexico, Toby Miller examines both ends of the production cycle of media technologies—manufacture and disposal—to demonstrate the interconnected ways that they are physically, economically, environmentally, and politically disabling. He reveals how these modes of disablement collectively produce the liminal status of “effluent citizenship” for poor and despised laborers on the fringes of the global economy upon whom the popular media depend.

Autism in Translation

Tasha Oren conducts close readings of the television documentaries Stairway to Heaven (Errol Morris, Bravo, 2000) and The Woman Who Thinks Like a Cow (Emma Sutten, BBC, 2006) and the fictionalized biopic Temple Grandin (Mick Jackson, HBO, 2010). These representations of Temple Grandin—prolific author, professor of animal science at Colorado University, and famous Autist—are used to explain shifts in popular understandings of autism in the 21st century. This chapter illustrates how close attention to film style and cultural representations can be used to understand larger social shifts in the meanings of disability.

Disability, Global Popular Media, and Injustice in the Trial of Oscar Pistorius

Drawing on disability studies, media studies, and the sociology of sport, Katie Ellis and Gerard Goggin argue that the case of runner Oscar Pistorius's killing of Reeva Steenkamp reveals the range, depth, and complexity of the cultural meanings of disability in contemporary society. Examining press accounts, legal arguments, and popular responses to the killing, they situate discourses of disability within multiple contexts, including the global sports industry and the dynamics of race and gender in a transforming South Africa. The "Pistorius affair," they suggest, makes visible the normally submerged roles that disability plays within popular culture, with implications for the ways that bodies, identities, and indeed life itself are understood.