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

It begins to appear that the problem is not that disabled people are infrequently featured
within TV and film, but that when they are shown it is almost only in contexts where
impairment is the subject being addressed or the hook for a particular plotline. Rather than
being included on their own terms, disabled people are only seen when they are raising
disability issues and disabled characters are only seen to remind the majority of viewers of
the advantage of normality.
My central argument in this chapter is that even if there is more representation of disabled
people in the media now than previously, this does not necessarily mean that it is better
representation. Whether there is more representation is questionable anyway: the problem
has never been to do with lack of media representation, but with kinds of representation.
Media involvement
There is a consensus among the participants in my research that to have greater involvement
of disabled people in media production processes can only be a good thing. To have more
disabled people working alongside and actively involved as media producers will, it is
suggested, lead inevitably to more accurate and balanced representation of disabled people.
This, it is believed, will lead to a more informed public awareness and therefore greater
acceptance of disabled people in ordinary everyday life. Talking of her own experience as a
BBC trainee, Roshni says:
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...you see it as a presence and, you know … something is better than nothing… to
have some form of media presence is better than having nothing at all… and I still
think that, to a certain degree … erm … you have to put something into the machine
to get something back… erm … you know, we have to work with the media in
order to increase the … erm … representation that we have got and the accuracy and
that‟s certainly what I was doing … (l.2:431ff.)
I want to suggest that something else happens. The assertion by disabled people of the right
to be different involves an explicit rejection of normality and, in Mitchell and Snyder‟s
terms, „an act of transgression‟ (Mitchell and Snyder, 2000:35) which problematises
normality. The structural function of TV and the rest of the media is to provide amusement,
distraction, and relief to ameliorate the violence performed by capitalism, to normalise rather
than provide a critique of capitalism. As Jean Baudrillard notes, transgression never gets on
the air without being transformed into something else. There is no better way to reduce the
impact of transgression „than to administer a mortal dose of publicity‟ (Baudrillard,
1981:173). Increased representation of disabled people within TV is about the creation of