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Start Date
25-6-2022 12:00 AM
End Date
25-6-2022 12:00 AM
Abstract
The popularity and media coverage of the Paralympic Games has been an important harbinger toward greater inclusion and visibility of disability across traditional and social media platforms. With its slick promotional trailers, celebrity performers, dramatic disability backstories, and glamorisation of Para athletes, contemporary Paralympic coverage—especially in the UK context—has led to the ‘normalisation’ of disability through a process of mediated marketability. However, as pointed to by previous research, this normalisation has centred on ableist neoliberal discourses via a praxis of disability exceptionalism where a certain kind of idealised disabled identity has been (re-)imagined and popularised; that of the ‘supercrip’ or ‘superhuman’. The ‘supercrip’ has received much interrogation by critical disability scholars, yet, to date, limited attention has been given to the way this body politic intersects with gendered and racial discourses and the way these operate to propagate and (re-)produce certain hierarchies of disabled normativity.
Based on Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) project (AH/T006684/1), this presentation explores this area of scholarship by focusing on the intersectional complexities that underpin the representation of Para athletes in the Tokyo 2021 Paralympic Games. We examine featured articles of Para athletes across popular online media as well as their Instagram posts and explore the way discourses of heteronormativity, postfeminism and racial privilege intersect with disability and how this is constructed and consumed; produced and challenged. We discuss the implications of this on the popular disability discourse and disability politics, and to that end, consider possibilities for a more equitable disability media discourse.
Gendered and raced representation of Paralympic athletes
Gendered and raced representation of Paralympic athletes
The popularity and media coverage of the Paralympic Games has been an important harbinger toward greater inclusion and visibility of disability across traditional and social media platforms. With its slick promotional trailers, celebrity performers, dramatic disability backstories, and glamorisation of Para athletes, contemporary Paralympic coverage—especially in the UK context—has led to the ‘normalisation’ of disability through a process of mediated marketability. However, as pointed to by previous research, this normalisation has centred on ableist neoliberal discourses via a praxis of disability exceptionalism where a certain kind of idealised disabled identity has been (re-)imagined and popularised; that of the ‘supercrip’ or ‘superhuman’. The ‘supercrip’ has received much interrogation by critical disability scholars, yet, to date, limited attention has been given to the way this body politic intersects with gendered and racial discourses and the way these operate to propagate and (re-)produce certain hierarchies of disabled normativity.
Based on Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) project (AH/T006684/1), this presentation explores this area of scholarship by focusing on the intersectional complexities that underpin the representation of Para athletes in the Tokyo 2021 Paralympic Games. We examine featured articles of Para athletes across popular online media as well as their Instagram posts and explore the way discourses of heteronormativity, postfeminism and racial privilege intersect with disability and how this is constructed and consumed; produced and challenged. We discuss the implications of this on the popular disability discourse and disability politics, and to that end, consider possibilities for a more equitable disability media discourse.
Bio
Dr Laura Mora is a postdoctoral research associate at Loughborough University, UK, working on the AHRC project Gendered Representation of Disability (AH/T006684/1) which analyses the (self-)representation of Para athletes in the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic media coverage. Laura’s research interests revolve around (social) media, minorities and intersectionality (gender, disability, race, and religion). She conducted PhD research at Keele University into hijab fashion bloggers’ (postfeminist) self-representations on social media, for which she has presented a paper at Console-ing Passions 2018.
l.mora@lboro.ac.uk
Dr Emma Pullen is a Lecturer in Sport Sociology as Loughborough University, UK. Her research primarily focuses on disability, Paralympics, media and broadcast, and gender (feminisms). She has published in Journals such as Culture, Media, Society, European Journal of Communication, and Cultural Studies. Emma is currently working on a number of research projects within the area of Paralympic media and broadcast and Paralympic stakeholders such as the International Paralympic Committee (IPC).
Professor Michael Silk is Professor in Sport & Social Sciences and Deputy Dean (Research & Professional Practice) in the Faculty of Management. His research and scholarship are interdisciplinary and focus on the relationships between sport & physical activity (physical culture), the governance of bodies, mediated (sporting) spectacles, identities and urban space.