Normative Tensions in the Popular Representation of Children with Disabilities and Animal-Assisted Therapy

Abstract


 
 
 This article contributes to the critical disability and human-nonhuman animal studies literatures through a discourse analysis of newspaper stories about animal-assisted therapy (AAT) and children with disabilities published in the United States and Canada. The articles in our corpus form a recognizable genre that we call AAT human-nonhuman animal interest stories. We pose two central questions of the genre: (1) how is the therapeutic value of AAT constituted? and (2) what are the effects, in discourse, of associating nonhuman animals and children with disabilities in narratives of therapeutic benefit? We emphasize the normative tensions associated with the representation of children with disabilities and nonhuman animals in news stories about AAT. On one hand, news articles objectify children with disabilities, inscribe their need to be made “normal” and silence their own experiences of AAT. On the other hand, they are written in ways that extend and strengthen the disabled body and self through connections with nonhuman therapy animals. They disrupt sharp species distinctions and present narratives of how interspecies relationships formed through participation in AAT co-constitute the agency of nonhuman therapy animals and children with disabilities. We argue that the normative tensions in the popular representation of AAT present important possibilities for intervening in public discourse about disability and nonhuman animals.
 
 

Cripping Girlhood on Service Dog Tok

“…Disability studies scholars have recently taken a critical eye to these ubiquitous popular media representations, revealing that they often construct the service dog as an "angel on a leash", or a savior who is the last resort for folding the disabled person into strictures of normative society [28][29][30]. Not only does this construction reinforce an ableist, medicalized understanding of disability as merely a target of "intervention and amelioration", or something that must be cured or fixed at all costs, but it also forwards a myopic understanding of the service dog as solely a tool whose purpose is to rehabilitate the disabled person [31][32][33]. This construction belies the nuanced experience of interdependency and relationality that many disabled handlers articulate in first-person narratives about their relationships with their service animals (for first-person narratives see: [23,24,[34][35][36]).…”