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Societies
Special Issues
Disability and the Media
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Disability and the Media

A special issue of Societies (ISSN 2075-4698).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 December 2023) | Viewed by 10553

Special Issue Editors

Prof. Dr. David T. Mitchell

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of English, Columbian College of Arts and Sciences, The George Washington University, Washington, DC 20052, USA
Interests: disability studies; American studies; genocide studies; Hawaiian literature; indigenous literatures of the Americas; social justice; race and disability; CripQueer studies
Dr. Sharon Lynn Snyder

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Independent Scholar, Washington, DC, USA
Interests: disability studies; film studies; disability in media; intersectional identities; independent disability cinema

Special Issue Information

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

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as conceptual papers are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Societies is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

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

Published Papers (4 papers)

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15 pages, 266 KiB  
Article
Cripping Girlhood on Service Dog Tok
by Anastasia Todd
Societies 2024, 14(2), 30; https://doi.org/10.3390/soc14020030 - 19 Feb 2024
Viewed by 1185
Abstract
This article explores how disabled girl handlers crip girlhood on service dog tok, the emergent subculture on TikTok comprised of disabled handlers who upload and post videos about their everyday life in partnership with a service dog. Looking at the TikTok accounts and [...] Read more.
This article explores how disabled girl handlers crip girlhood on service dog tok, the emergent subculture on TikTok comprised of disabled handlers who upload and post videos about their everyday life in partnership with a service dog. Looking at the TikTok accounts and self-representational practices of three disabled girl handlers—Ava of @avaandcheddar, Claire of @rosie.the.sd, and Lexy of @muslimservicedogmom28—this article traces how their videos evince an audio–visual representation of interspecies intimacy, a becoming with, that complicates the familiar story of the disabled girl handler/service dog dyad that one might see or scroll past online—one of rehabilitative exceptionalism, disability disavowal, and chrononormative understandings of girlhood. On service dog tok, Ava, Claire, Lexy, and their service dogs broadcast the quotidian and move against a service dog sentimentalism that seeks to depoliticize disability and the relationship between disabled handlers and their service dogs. Their videos produce and circulate a nuanced understanding of interdependence, care, and ableism forged via the mutual entanglement with their service dogs. Ultimately, this article argues that disabled girl handlers on service dog tok upend what we think we know about disabled girls and girlhoods, recasting the meanings ascribed to their bodyminds, experiences, and their relationships with their service dogs in their own terms. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Disability and the Media)
15 pages, 304 KiB  
Article
Sad Cases and Success Stories: Representations of Multiple Sclerosis in Direct-to-Consumer Pharmaceutical Advertising
by Ella Houston
Societies 2023, 13(7), 158; https://doi.org/10.3390/soc13070158 - 03 Jul 2023
Viewed by 1866
Abstract
This article examines representations of multiple sclerosis in direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertisements televised during 2021 in the United States. Drawing on and developing Cultural Disability Studies theory, it highlights how advertising produced by pharmaceutical companies influences mass understandings, as well as personal experiences of, [...] Read more.
This article examines representations of multiple sclerosis in direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertisements televised during 2021 in the United States. Drawing on and developing Cultural Disability Studies theory, it highlights how advertising produced by pharmaceutical companies influences mass understandings, as well as personal experiences of, multiple sclerosis. The application of textual analysis to a small-sample of direct-to-consumer advertisements that promote drug therapies for multiple sclerosis (n. 4) uncovers the prevalence of profit-driven, rather than person-driven, medical neoliberal ideologies. On first impressions, the advertisements appear to challenge the metanarrative of multiple sclerosis as a life-limiting tragedy. However, the research findings reveal that multiple sclerosis is framed as the “hidden enemy” of the American dream, supposedly threatening individuals’ abilities to live productive and meaningful lives, while the consumption of pharmaceutical “wonder” drugs is treated as an act of self-empowerment. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Disability and the Media)
17 pages, 279 KiB  
Article
How He Got His Scars: Exploring Madness and Mental Health in Filmic Representations of the Joker
by Jeff Preston and Lindsay Rath-Paillé
Societies 2023, 13(2), 48; https://doi.org/10.3390/soc13020048 - 17 Feb 2023
Viewed by 5174
Abstract
In May of 1939, DC Comics introduced their popular Batman series, but it was a year later when the iconic villain, the Joker, entered the story. What began as a lighthearted pulp comic has since evolved, with Batman’s enemies growing darker and more [...] Read more.
In May of 1939, DC Comics introduced their popular Batman series, but it was a year later when the iconic villain, the Joker, entered the story. What began as a lighthearted pulp comic has since evolved, with Batman’s enemies growing darker and more sinister. In the film, the Joker is now less “clown prince” than violent madman, determined to wreak havoc and spread his warped view of society. Through a thematic discourse analysis, this article explores how Batman films featuring the Joker routinely naturalize and reinforce sanist beliefs about mental illness and are deployed as narrative prostheses to rationalize his heinous crimes. Blending work from both disability studies and mad studies, we explore the cultural construction of madness as animated by filmic representations of the Joker and consider how these narratives inform perceptions of mental illness and subsequently rationalize the disciplining of mad people. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Disability and the Media)

Other

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18 pages, 643 KiB  
Concept Paper
Disability Ghosting in the Double Lockdown Institution of COVID-19
by David Thomas Mitchell
Societies 2023, 13(7), 170; https://doi.org/10.3390/soc13070170 - 21 Jul 2023
Viewed by 915
Abstract
This paper surveys some of the voluminous journalistic coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic and the public health responses that ensued. While investigative reporting in newspapers and news programming played an important function, we expose the terms of the underreporting about the lockdowns in [...] Read more.
This paper surveys some of the voluminous journalistic coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic and the public health responses that ensued. While investigative reporting in newspapers and news programming played an important function, we expose the terms of the underreporting about the lockdowns in institutions for the disabled and elderly that ultimately changed little about public knowledge of the lives of disabled people who were always or already confined. Second, we detail the rapid unfolding of a critical journalism that revealed the mortality-dealing conditions of institutionalization beyond the acceleration of pandemic risk levels. Such governmental and for-profit run practices of letting individuals who were disabled or elderly die while in their care were enacted, of which residents could do nothing to protect themselves (in fact, risky exposure was a conscious practice of state governments during the unfolding viral epidemic). This essay argues, however, that a critical branch of COVID-19 journalism (largely based in the US) used investigative reporting to expose governmental miscounting, undercounting, and neglecting-to-count of disability deaths due to COVID-19 and/or to collect them under “other categories,” such as the overall death rate of a population. Our key findings point out that despite the importance of this coverage, no one used this opportunity to talk with institutionalized disabled and/or elderly people—who were gravely at risk. Thus, we learned little about disabled peoples’ lives as they were shipped back to congregate care settings and institutions from hospitals without treatment. An opportunity to explain disability institutionalization and its inherent dangers were lost despite the media saturation of coverage that rose in the wake of COVID-19 public health policies and practices. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Disability and the Media)
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