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

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Ade was another Beyond Boundaries contestant… he‟s probably one of the most
recognisable disabled people in the country… and there was a Guardian interview
with him that I read… and the interviewer asked him is your house… is your home
adapted to be accessible… at which point he got angry with the interviewer… and he
was saying “I don‟t have nothing like that… I just get on with it…” …and the
interview said that‟s great… what a message to put out… similarly The One Show…
they had this sort of feature on people going back to the houses they grew up in…
and they had Tanni Grey-Thompson… going back to her house… and she said my
dad was the architect but they didn‟t adapt the house in any way because they
thought it was better that I pull myself up the stairs… you know… and adapt to my
surroundings… cos that would serve me well in later life…
I suggest that TV programmes like Beyond Boundaries create disabled celebrities whose role
is to perform the same function as any celebrities: of naturalising perceptions which reduce
social issues to individual challenges. Because they are disabled „achievers‟ Ade and Tanni
are held up as exemplars, not only to other disabled people but to non-disabled people too.
The never-ending round of self-congratulation in which the media indulge distracts from
structural causes of inequality: young disabled people are encouraged by Ade and Tanni to
overcome their limitations; older disabled people who have never been Ades or Tannis are
reminded of their own inadequacy.
Simultaneously, as Ben points out, a disciplinary discourse is being imposed on non-disabled
people:
Stereotypes
disability is used… as a warm, human interest story… as a sort of morality fable…
but still in order to say if a disabled person can do this…if someone can do it in spite
of all this difficulty, why can‟t you… you don‟t have all these barriers and
„handicaps‟… so you should think yourself so lucky to be who you are and able to
do what you can… so you ought to do something moral with that… instead of just
having a good time… (l.2:456ff.)
We may not realise it, but very often we learn about other people through what we
see in the mass media. This is especially true when the other people we‟re talking
about are different from ourselves and we have little face-to-face contact with
members of their group... When we fear or reject the influence of mass media, we
make ourselves vulnerable to being directly used or manipulated. In the case of