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

Abstract

Disability is an increasingly dominant aspect of television representation, audiences, industries and policy internationally and offers many insights into issues of exclusion and inclusion. In this article, we reflect upon disability and the histories of Australian television through a case study of a much loved and long-running soap – Home and Away. In particular, we explore issues of inclusion via an analysis of the representation of overlooked disabilities, such as mental health, chronic illness and other ‘invisible’ disabilities, contrasting a key moment in the programme in the late 1990s with developments in the 2002–2019 period.

The performative body of disabled women: Toward the politics of visibility in China

“…That is, it indicated a sort of ‘politics of visibility’, a process of making visible a political category such as gender, race and disability that is and has been historically marginalized or invisible to the public, media, policy, law and so on (Banet-Weiser, 2015: 55). The politics of disability visibility have also been leveraged as a response, or even supply, to the social demand for the greater representation of disabled people due to the disability advocacy since the 1970s (Mantilla and Goggin, 2019).…”

“…On the one hand, it has been gradually understood that the salience of disability representation may have a broader effect in various contexts (Lyons et al, 2018). On the other hand, there are more scholars studying disabled people’s struggles for visibility, thus making the invisible visible in academia (Kim and Sellmaier, 2020; Mantilla and Goggin, 2019).…”

“…In an era of the proliferation of difference, these claims contributed to not only the positive and diversified identities of disabled women in China but also a new society of disabling diversity as a whole. However, we should not romanticize such politics of visibility or merely visualize and celebrate diversity since the push for diversity ‘often does not lead to structural change’ (Mantilla and Goggin, 2019: 3), and may just lead to the so-called ‘inclusionism’ (Mitchell and Snyder, 2014). Rather, we needed new ways to create environments where disabled people can be successful in ways that they define themselves.…”