Disability Representation in Film, TV, and Print Media

Michael S. Jeffress (PhD, Regent University) is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Tennessee State University in Nashville, Tennessee. He has been involved in disability advocacy work since the late-1990s, after his son was diagnosed with Duchenne muscular dystrophy. He is a past recipient of the Top Paper Award from the Disability Issues Caucus of the National Communication Association. He is the author of Communication, Sport and Disability: The Case of Power Soccer (2015) and editor of Pedagogy, Disability and Communication: Applying Disability Studies in the Classroom (2017) and International Perspectives on Teaching with Disability: Overcoming Obstacles and Enriching Lives (2018), all in Routledge’s Interdisciplinary Disability Studies Series.

Introduction. 1. Parasocial contact effects and a disabled actor in Speechless. 2. Women with disability: Sex object and supercrip stereotyping on reality television’s Push Girls. 3. A critical examination of the intersection of sexuality and disability in Special, a Netflix series. 4. Euphemistic processes on the MDA Show of Strength Telethon, 2012-2014: The Post-Jerry Lewis years. 5. Hegemonic constructions and corporeal deviance in portrayals of physically disabled women characters on Saturday Night Live. 6. Inspiring people or perpetuating stereotypes?: The complicated case of disability as inspiration. 7. The patronized supercrip: A textual analysis of The Peanut Butter Falcon. 8. How Silence Rhetorically Constructs Deafness in A Quiet Place: The Silent Treatment. 9. The communication of disability through children’s media: Potential, problems, and potential problems. 10. Discursive representations of disability in children’s picture books on disabled parents. 11. An interrogation of select Indian literary works through disability discourse: Loud yet unheard. 12. Abuse and/as disability in Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s Dirty River: How to speak without words. 13. Media, culture, and news framing of disability in Kenya’s Daily Nation newspaper.