Self-representation of people with disabilities
“Disabling” the audience, challenging aesthetic norms and employing ironic echoing
This paper examines the contribution of multimodal strategies in challenging aspects of public discourse about
people with disabilities. It looks into media texts that were created by people with disabilities, in which the topic of
disability is not a metaphor or a narrative prosthesis, but a demand for recognition and a call for a sincere dialogue, using
three complementary strategies: disabling the viewers, challenging dominant aesthetic norms, and ironic echoing. The paper focuses
on two autobiographical videos, a promotional video, a small corpus of paintings and a photograph, in which ironic echoing is the
dominant strategy.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Disability: Conceptualization, models and media representation
- 3.Methodology
- 4.Representations of disabled individuals in the media
- 5.A reversal of perspective and posing a demand to the audience
- 5.1Disabling the audience: Undermining the reliability of the senses
- 5.2Challenging aesthetic norms
- 5.3Ironic echoing
- 6.Conclusion
- Notes
-
References
References (45)
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