“A Blessed Boon”: Radio, Disability, Governmentality, and the Discourse of the “Shut-In,” 1920–1930

Abstract

One of the most frequently invoked figures in U.S. policy discourse in the 1920s was the "shut-in" to whom radio technology promised greater integration in national life. Radio's ability to transcend distance was widely hailed as a "blessed boon" to those whose disability was seen to prevent their full participation in American society.

While the technology undoubtedly improved the lives of countless disabled persons, the actual listening practices of shut-ins were largely secondary to political strategies that put disability at the center of media policy. Indeed, the shut-in was second only to the noble farmer as the rhetorical figure of choice in debates over the future direction of American radio, with the discourse of disability used primarily to justify policies favoring fewer high-powered national radio stations over more lower-powered stations. At the same time, the discourse helped shape understandings of disability itself in both negative and positive ways, with radio constructed as a technology of both inclusion and exclusion.

This paper situates the discourse of the shut-in within the theoretical concerns of Foucauldian governmentality, and at the intersection of critical cultural policy studies and critical disability studies. It reveals the importance of dis/ability to the processes of refashioning communication technologies into instruments of governmentality, as well as the role of media technology in issues of compulsory able-bodiedness and the imagination of "ideal abnormal" bodies that can be subjected to management.

Keywords:

• Critical cultural policy studies
• Critical disability studies
• Radio broadcasting
• Media policy
• Governmentality

Acknowledgments

The author thanks the editors and reviewers of CSMC for their suggestions and feedback, as well as Brenda Boyle, Liz Ellcessor, Anna Nekola, Lauren Pitler, and D. Travers Scott for their valuable contributions to this essay.

Notes

1. This was the era during which the “poster child” was invented, with professional charities using the image of the “cripple” to raise funds for the medical rehabilitation of persons with disabilities (Longmore & Goldberger, 2000).

2. For example, an article titled “The Arctic listens” argued that “Northerners are beginning to consider a radio set not only a wonderful luxury but also a necessity. Being able to receive the broadcast, the voice of civilization, is insurance against stagnation of mind and depression of spirit; it dispels the loneliness even from the farthest frontier” (Hastings, 1933).

3. One especially notorious Chicago law read: “No person who is diseased, maimed, mutilated or in any way deformed so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object or improper person to be allowed in or on the public ways or other public places in this city, shall therein or thereon expose himself to public view” (quoted in Longmore & Goldberger, 2000, p. 894; see also Schweik, 2009, pp. 1–2).

4. It is worth noting that this was the time of some of the most contentious debates in U.S. history over the power of religion in the face of science and technology, adding another layer to the use of the shut-in to help claim radio technology for religion.

5. As Goggin and Newell (2005) put it, “That the social and discursive shaping of technologies proceeds via a promissory note that they will confer unalloyed benefits upon people with disabilities reveals a fundamentally flawed approach to disability” (2005, p. 263).

6. In this essay I do not have space to adequately explore the gender implications of these discourses, but the intersections of activity–publicity–masculinity and passivity–privacy–femininity in relation to the shut-in would certainly reward analysis. In this context, it is worth pointing out that the feminized and privatized body of the shut-in was not only often physically disqualified from mastering the technology, but culturally disqualified as well.

7. As in a 1938 NBC guide to programming standards: “Material which depends upon physical imperfections of deformities such as blindness, deafness, or lameness, for humorous effect is not acceptable. Physical infirmities are far from ludicrous to those afflicted, therefore radio must seek other sources for its humor” (The National Broadcasting Company, 1938).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bill Kirkpatrick

Bill Kirkpatrick is Assistant Professor of Media Studies in the Communication Department of Denison University, Ohio, USA