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

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Society really does view all disabled people as kind of perpetual children – still,
despite laws, despite all the talk, despite all the awareness... Vulnerability, lack of
capability, immature abilities – these are all traits that we, as a society, want to deny
in ourselves – that we seek to project onto others. Who better to project them onto
than disabled people? And that‟s what society‟s been doing. It‟s a lot easier to
project one‟s vulnerability onto someone else – a disabled person – than to have to
face it personally (Cole and Johnson, 1994:134).
There exists a gulf in terms of celebrities‟ roles and disabled people‟s roles in relation to the
charity business. While this is typically represented in terms of benefactors and beneficiaries,
I suggest we can also regard what is going on in terms of symbolic enactments which sustain
the values of individualistic capitalism. Richard Dyer observes that:
stars articulate what it means to be a human being in contemporary society, that is,
they express the notion that we hold of the person, of „the individual‟ (Dyer,
2003:8).
Through processes of marketing and management the celebrity is constructed to embody the
values of freedom, independence and individualism. As charity figurehead, the magnetism of
celebrity (regarded in terms of unique talent) draws the public gaze to the plight of the
nameless disabled. The contrast could not be greater. Dyer suggests that fascination with
celebrity is related to the need to make sense of experience in terms of contemporary social
organisation:
We‟re fascinated by stars because they enact ways of making sense of the experience
of being a person in a particular kind of social production (capitalism), with its
particular organisation of social life into public and private spheres. We love them
because they represent how we think that experience is or how it would be lovely to
feel that it is. Stars present typical ways of behaving, feeling and thinking in
contemporary society, ways that have been socially, culturally, historically
constructed (Dyer, 2003:17).
The sight and association of celebrity alongside its symbolic opposite, dependent disabled
nonentity, serves to naturalise horizons within existing structural relations. Taylor and Harris
remark that:
while the essential elements of the commodity system remain undisturbed, celebrity
faces effectively distract us from the much less glamorous and more mundane