Disability and television: Notes from the field

Abstract

Drawing on extensive experience working in film and television production, this article reflects on the practical and cultural problems encountered by programmemakers working with participants with disabilities. This article aims to give advice to other programme-makers, and does so within practical contexts such as budgetary constraints and ‘typical’ working practices. In doing so, the intention here is to support wider diversity on-screen, and to enable television to better work with, and represent, people with disabilities.

Battle Scars: Wonder Woman, Aesthetic Geopolitics and Disfigurement in Hollywood Film

“…This reflects, of course, the normalising of conventional standards of beauty and ableism in contemporary Hollywood (Kashani and Nocella 2010). It reflects, too, the preponderance of 'cripping up', in which the performance of disability is just that; an enactment by a non-disabled actor (Barton 2015). In Wonder Woman, disfigurement has no real-world referentthe actors would not normally be called disfiguredand in this way disfigurement is literally disembodied.…”

Thirty years of (in)visible disability in Australian television: Home and Away’s experiments with representation and inclusion

“…Disability is recognised as a key element in the dynamics of inclusion, exclusion and representation in society, in which media plays an intriguing and crucial part (Ellcessor and Kirkpatrick, 2017; Goggin and Ellis, 2015). Apart from the foundational work of Katie Ellis (2015a, 2019), and a handful of other scholars internationally (Cumberbatch and Negrine, 1992; Longmore, 2016), there is little research on disability in television, and even less on television history – although, thankfully, important work is emerging (Barton, 2015; Brylla and Hughes, 2017).…”