Stigma management as celebration: disability, difference, and the marketing of diversity

Abstract

In this paper, I present a celebration of diversity as a new form of stigma management based on a qualitative analysis of media images of disabled bodies in fashion shows, advertising, and other marketing campaigns. In making my arguments I am chiefly concerned with modes of stigma management appropriate to discrediting stigma, stigma that cannot be concealed and must be managed if the individual is not to suffer the punitive reactions of others. To date, modes of stigma management conceptualise the disabled body in a negative manner. In covering attention must be distracted from the disability, whereas disclosing is meant to defuse what is fearful or frustrating about the disability, and finally, in deviance disavowal and challenging the negative attributes of disability must be transcended or transferred. I argue that celebration of diversity is different as it does not conceptualise the disabled body in a negative way but rather reflects the normalisation of disabled bodies in contemporary culture, a key attribute of which is the valuing of diversity.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Dorothy Pawluch for her cogent insights on an earlier version of this paper and I also thank Editor John Grady and the anonymous reviewers of this paper for their discerning and helpful suggestions for revision.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

[1] See also Hunt (1991) whose analysis generated a list of 10 negative stereotypes about disabled bodies commonly found in media portrayals of people with disabilities.

[2] Given that the images analysed are on the Internet, the socio-cultural context can, in some respects, be understood as global.

[3] For instance, it is questionable whether they have increased employment opportunities for people with disabilities in the United States or Britain (Bell and Heitmueller 2008).

[4] There has been considerable debate over the years that span the Generation X birth cohort. Dunphy (1999) and others argue that the cohort spans the three decades of 1960 through 1980 (Eskilson and Wiley 1999; Ortner 1998; Twenge and Donnelly 2016; Williams et al. 1997). Others extend the range of this cohort to the 1990s (Trenton 1997). In a more nuanced analysis Dunphy (1999) divides the cohort between those born before and those born after the 1970s concluding that ‘for those born before 1970 and probably up until 1975, the telecommunications advances came too late to influence basic personality and culture. However, those born after 1975, and certainly after 1980 (the boomlet), have been affected by the global culture and the age of the Internet'.

Additional information

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Jacqueline Low

Dr. Jacqueline Low is a Professor of Sociology at the University of New Brunswick, Canada. Her areas of expertise are qualitative methodology, symbolic interactionist theory, the sociology of health, illness, and the body, chronic illness and disability, as well as deviant behaviour and social problems. Among her most significant publications are: Low, J. (2008). ‘Structure, agency, and social reality in Blumerian symbolic interactionism: The influence of Georg Simmel’ (Symbolic Interaction), and Low, J. & Bowden, G. (2013). The Chicago School Diaspora: Epistemology and Substance (McGill-Queens University Press).