Disability media studies

Disability Media Studies seeks to establish a new field; the field of disability media studies. The book recognises that whilst disability studies and media studies have influenced each other, there has been little concerted attempt to combine the two fields. Thus, the rationale for the book is that ‘Neither disability studies nor media studies, on its own, has adequately grappled with the complexities of disability and media together’ (3). The book does not attempt to delimit this new field in terms in terms of scope, extent, theoretical or methodological persuasion, or anything else. Rather, it seeks to initiate the field by staging ‘interdisciplinary conversations’, presenting a diverse anthology of essays covering a considerable range of topics, perspectives, theories, methods and so on. These essays are organised under six topics, bookended by an Introduction and two Afterwords. There are two or three essays under each theme: Access and Media Production; Disability and Race; Disability and Gender; Disability and Celebrity Culture; Disability and Temporality; and Disability and Technology. Helpfully, there is a second Contents page which organises the chapters by medium – film, television and so on – to assist readers in navigating the book.

The Introduction sets out three ‘overarching hopes’ (4) for the interdisciplinary conversation currently staged within its pages; hopes for the ways disability studies and media studies could further cross-fertilise. These are that:

(i) More disability scholars will move beyond textual analysis of media representations to consider more fully the role of media within economic and ideological circuits of production and reception (ii) Media scholars will become more aware of the broader range of embodiments that shape and are shaped by our encounters with media (iii) All scholars will recognise themselves in the critically oriented, humanities-centred concern with social, cultural and economic justice that unites both disability studies and media studies, energizing their scholarship and helping develop disability media studies on theoretical, methodological, and political common ground. (4)

The Introduction then moves to giving succinct overviews of the two core disciplines and a vision of how and why these should be brought together. A central, welcome and illuminating concern throughout the book is scholars moving beyond representations of disability to consider how disability constitutes media and vice versa. Each essay is skilful in relating mediation and representation to broader cultural issues. These broader issues include, by way of example, disabled people’s access to production and civic participation in and through media, not just consumption of media products; and the range of ways in which media texts, products, processes and industries are inherently disabling. Several times I was reminded of George McKay’s (2013) Shakin’ All Over and its exposition of the way the pop music industry both hides disability in plain sight and actively disables both performers and audience (through prolonged excessive amplification, for instance). These sorts of arguments are extended in interesting and perhaps unexpected ways; Toby Miller’s chapter, for example, details the ways in which the manufacture, recycling and disposal of the electronics hardware on which the modern media industry relies is disabling for people he calls ‘effluent citizens’ (295): the majority-world, unseen, unsung ragpickers, recyclers and factory workers who represent the ‘dark side of the [silicon] chip’ (303).

Another strength of the book lies in its variety. This makes it more likely that different readers will find something of value in the volume. Of particular interest to me was Mack Hagood’s chapter on tinnitus, which reasserts a core premise of the book – the ways that subjects, culture and media artefacts shape each other – through drawing on studies of disability, healthcare and technology, in showing us how modern medicine relies on digital media to legitimise impairments, make diagnoses and communicate with and treat patients. Hagood draws on Tobin Siebers’ conceptualisation of complex embodiment in articulating the reciprocal, interactive relationship between bodies, representations and environment, a process he names biomediation. As someone who has experienced two prolonged episodes of tinnitus – the first as a result of working for a sustained period in the popular music industry, the second (ongoing) the product of a bout of pneumonia – Hagood’s chapter caused me to reflect on ‘what counts’ as impairment or disability, and to what extent my use of what he terms ‘orphic media’ (322), more commonly called ‘sound therapy’, is a product of a cultural imperative of health rather than a straightforward response to the distracting and frustrating ringing and whining in my ears.

No doubt other readers will find other chapters that speak to them just as directly. Elizabeth Ellcessor’s chapter sets the tone by moving beyond media representations to explore access to production and civic participation and activism via independent, online television, using James Paul Gee’s (2005) concept of the affinity space. Julie Passanante Elman critiques ABC’s After School Specials, which began in the 1970s against a Cold War backdrop and negotiated a complex terrain of heteronormativity, disability representation and commercial television seeking to position itself as educational. Within the theme of Disability and Race, Alex Porco makes the case for disability-as-practice in hip-hop, with performers ‘flipping the script’ (91) on disability, cripping their voices to achieve distinctiveness and hence audience appeal. Lori Kido Lopez extends Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s conceptualisation of the stare, noting that disabled characters on television cannot stare back as they can in the street or supermarket, and using this as a basis to offer an ethical approach to watching television. We then move to consider Disability and Gender. Observing its chronological and thematic relationships with the Afghan and Iraq conflicts, Ellen Samuels uses the movie Ironman 3 as a vehicle for ‘thinking through the material circumstances of returning [male] disabled veterans in 21^st-century America’ (130). D. Travers Scott and Meagan Bates problematise US television adverts for anti-anxiety medications, arguing that these medications are made more profitable through commercials which represent mental impairments as a normal part of femininity rather than an aberration. Under the theme of Celebrity Culture, Krystal Cleary explores Lady Gaga’s appropriation of freakery, Katie Ellis and Gerard Goggin examine the role of the global media in Oscar Pistorius’ murder trial, and Tasha Oren traces the way three films about Temple Grandin made in different decades have mirrored changing cultural conceptions of autism. Under Disability and Temporality, Shoshana Magnet and Amanda Watson analyse graphic novels and their potential for communicating alternate temporalities of disability which are at odds with normative expectations of time and productivity. Both this and Robert McRuer’s subsequent chapter on homonormativity and crip modes of desire, evidenced in the film Any Day Now, use the notion of disabled temporalities ‘haunting’ media narratives. The final theme is Disability and Technology. This includes Miller and Hagood’s chapters, outlined earlier, as well as Bill Kirkpatrick’s essay on how the discourse of the ‘shut-in’ isolated disabled person reciprocally shaped disability and media policy in the early days of radio broadcasting. The book closes with the two Afterwords; the first by Rachel Adams, and the second by Mara Mills and Jonathon Sterne. Both offer a number of suggestions and directions for continuing, expanding and diversifying the conversations staged in the book.

Disability Media Studies is strongly interdisciplinary, drawing on cultural disability studies, a range of media studies subfields and a host of other disciplines. As such, I think it can be judged a success in terms of its aim of initiating a fruitful conversation and characterising a distinctive new field. This is of course a considerable achievement, yet the book is also accessibly written for an academic text and I can easily imagine, for example, recommending it to both undergraduate and postgraduate students undertaking dissertations, although there is undoubtedly much here for more seasoned scholars too. A factor in its accessibility is that, in the main, the essays wear their theory lightly. Similarly, there is little detailed discussion of methodology or methods of analysis; of how these theories have been put to work in analysing texts. The analyses tend to be presented as ‘done deals’. This might ultimately be a limitation of the book’s usefulness to early-stage researchers, although it is a criticism that could perhaps be addressed at cultural disability studies more broadly. That said, Disability Media Studies does not set out to be a methodological text, and the conversation presented here is certainly one that disability and media scholars could benefit from attending to.

Owen Barden
Department of Disability and Education
Liverpool Hope University
Liverpool, UK
[email protected]