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

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… which is complete bollocks….she got an apology … a printed apology …
(l.2:632ff.)
While the material in Lola and Nancy‟s sketch has been permitted to surface within media
discourse, it has been carefully shunted onto The Guardian‟s health pages. Where Nancy
refused to identify her impairment, an impairment has been ascribed to her. What we see
here confirms Lodziak‟s remark on ideology within the media:
Most conceptions of the dominant ideology allow for the kind of flexibility which
enables a range of alternative meanings to be incorporated in it (Lodziak, 1986:38).
When it is claimed that the media produces and reproduces a dominant ideology, it is
understood that the dominant ideology itself embodies some ambiguity. While it is regarded
as permissible, or even occasionally encouraged, to allow a social model perspective to be
encountered within the terms of contemporary media discourse, it is important that this
remains considered as but one of a plurality of perspectives rather than having any claim to
truth status. Where the self is seen as a reflexive project, constantly undergoing change as it
weighs up debates and contestations, the social model is treated as one narrative among
many available to be chosen from. In opposition to the views of social modellists who regard
medical and social models as fundamentally opposed ways of understanding disability
(Drake, 1999:14), media culture encourages us to regard both as valid (though the
infrequency with which the social model is considered ensures that its significance remains
perceived as marginal). In Anthony Giddens‟ terms, whereas the politics of the personal uses
lifestyle patterns as a means of addressing or combating oppression, the life politics
promoted by the media does not primarily concern the conditions which liberate us in order
to make choices: it is a politics which promotes choice for its own sake (Giddens,
2003:214/216).
Reflecting the structures of modern capitalism, media discourse endlessly promotes the
primacy of the individual. While it is possible to talk in terms of a discourse which identifies
disability as an unequal social relationship, so long as this remains as talk it need not trouble
the way things „just are‟. In Ben‟s words:
The social model really doesn‟t get a look-in when it comes to media
representation, does it, because the media is about… especially modern
media… is about the media communicating to you as an individual… the
media communicates to you individually… you don‟t get a sense that you‟re