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

166
other indecent part of it … anyway, they wanted to recreate lots of blind people
feeling this elephant … (l.2:150ff.)
Talking about a Radio Scotland interview she took part in a few years ago, Jennie explained
that:
...when people want to talk about disability, they want to talk about
people who are living their own lives in spite of their disabilities and all
that kind of thing… people who‟ve had a lot to cope with… we talked
about other aspects of life to an extent, but there was still this idea of…
you know… constantly how bad it must be for me and… well, yes, I
know that… I had noticed… but it‟s not really the focus of anything I
do… and I think it… it gives people a disjointed perspective (l.2:87ff.)
Commenting on TV documentaries focussing on the individual lived experience of
impairment, Jennie also remarked that:
I do see advertisements for things like that, and am occasionally asked
to appear in things… to which the answer is generally a no… not that
I‟m afraid of the media but I think those kinds of representations are
pretty pointless… (l.2:72ff.)
I would take issue with Jennie here regarding the pointlessness of these documentaries,
though not in terms of benefiting the disabled people taking part. Just as normality dramas
create narratives re-affirming the ideology of normality, so too do such „factual‟
investigations. By fixing the objectifying public gaze upon the „flawed‟ bodies of disabled
individuals, established horizons are strengthened: disability is reaffirmed as an individual
problem most appropriately resolved at the domestic level.
I am, of course, aware that the most recent of the quotes I have used from Klobas, Barnes
and Darke is twelve years old. In terms of television and film history a decade or two is a
long time and it might be objected that arguments made then will not necessarily still be
valid. However, it is demonstrably not the case that things have significantly „got better‟. We
can identify this by considering Roshni‟s two following statements. The first relates to her
recollections of an awareness-raising film produced in the mid-eighties: