A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of - Etheses - Queen Margaret ...

unceasing flow of representations, amusements, celebrities, pseudo-events and spectacles on
offer to ensure that public discourse is trivialised to the extent that meaningful criticism of
existing social relations becomes difficult or unlikely. When news is packaged as
entertainment, information is provided that gives the illusion of knowing but that actually
prevents knowledge (Postman, 2006). What is known is banal. In a television age viewers‟
minds are conditioned by useless expectations and their critical faculties inhibited (Sigman,
2007). The point is not that ideology forces itself but that it sells itself. It seduces rather than
imposes. Mass media audiences are not deceived into false consciousness but, rather,
willingly participate and connive at their own oppression (Taylor and Harris, 2008:132).
The ideology of normality is substantiated through the constant circulation within popular
culture of images and narratives representing impairment and disability as personal tragedy.
Disability representations involve the endless repetition of a small number of stereotypes: the
poor, pathetic victim, dependent on others for pity and charity; the bitter and twisted monster
with a chip on his shoulder; the plucky, tragic but brave struggler, determined against the
odds to triumph over adversity; the laughable incompetent, incapable of participating fully in
everyday life (Rieser and Mason, 1992:96). The personal tragedy model is the cultural
expression of the medical model and is materialised through the recycling of disciplinary
messages that normality is good, abnormality is bad; that „able-bodiedness‟ is valued,
impairment and disability are the shameful marks of inferiority (Cameron, 2008:17). Tanya
Titchkosky states that texts are always oriented social action, producing meanings: they act
on us and help constitute our social contexts (Titchkosky, 2007:23). Popular cultural
disability stereotypes play an important role in limiting the narratives available to disabled
people to reflect on in constructing identity. Stephen Duncombe (2007:18) states that „reality
is always refracted through the imagination, and it is through our imagination that we live
our lives‟. Identity is not a fixed, inner characteristic but a struggle, emerging and re-
emerging as the stories we use to live develop, and dependent upon the choices we make. It
is a „creative work of the imagination... grounded in the real world in which it functions‟
(MacAdams, 1993:112).
If the experience of disabled people of the real world is that it constantly „tells us we‟re shit
because we‟re disabled‟ (Fraser, 2004) then the imagination is given little on which to build
that is positive. The personal tragedy model provides a storyline through which impairment
can only be experienced as a discreditable personal characteristic.
What problematises grasping the idea of disability as oppression is the mundane, everyday
level at which this takes place. As Iris Young observes, oppression involves:
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