Book Review: Disability and Popular Culture: Focusing Passion, Creating Community and Expressing Defiance (Katie Ellis)Reviewed by Kathryn AllanTo tackle the representation and meaning of disability in popular culture in one book is an enormous undertaking. As both disability studies and popular culture studies have so many different entrances and take-aways, I was quite curious to discover just how Katie Ellis was going to bring together the two scholarly fields in her new book, Disability and Popular Culture: Focusing Passion, Creating Community and Expressing Defiance. Part of Ashgate's The Cultural Politics of Media and Popular Culture series, Ellis' text notably begins to fill in a gap in disability studies and popular culture scholarship. While there are many other texts that address one aspect of popular culture—whether TV shows, music, sports, and so on—Disability and Popular Culture is like a sign post, pointing the way to divergent existing scholarship (both academic and fan generated). As well, and perhaps more importantly, Ellis clearly articulates the overall impact of these various analyses of cultural narratives on our understanding of and relationship to disability. In her Introduction, subtitled "Producerly Disability," Ellis does an excellent job setting out and defining terms common in the academic field of popular culture. One of the guiding concepts of the book she introduces to new readers is that of the "producerly text," which is a popular text (like a movie or comic book) that "offers itself up to popular production," and that can be considered "simultaneously disabling and enabling" (10-11). A producerly text, then, is one that encourages its readers and consumers to "rewrite" it and "make sense of it" on their own terms (10). Such producerly texts are taken up throughout Disability and Popular Culture, as Ellis suggests ways in which a whole variety of popular culture products—from documentaries to children's toys—both recreate and subvert ableist narratives. For example, as Ellis discusses in her chapter focused on science fiction cinema, a film like James Cameron's Avatar has been rightfully criticized for its stereotypical depiction of a wheel-chair user, and, at the same time, it has also introduced "optimism around technology while critiquing the disabling impact of corporate values" (78). Using Avatar as a case study, she shows how disabled audiences reacted to the film's themes of medicalization, militarization, and colonialization with varying levels of identification and resistance. Throughout the seven main chapters of Disability and Popular Culture, Ellis traces the ways in which audiences read the dominant—and often ableist—message about disability as well as identifies their intentional "misreadings" that better reflect or comment on their lived (disabled) realities. In Chapter 2, for instance, Ellis first offers a brief history of the evolution of disability toys from the early 20th century medical models (used to demonstrate medical procedures to kids in hospital) to the popular culture toys like Hal's Pals (the 1980s Cabbage Patch-style dolls that had a variety of visible disabilities) and Mattel's Share a Smile Becky (a wheel-chair using Barbie doll introduced in 1996). She explains how these types of toys were produced due to public demand for more inclusive toys and how they reflect changing cultural expectations of disability, gender, and race in childhood play. Ellis then provides insightful analyses of the popular culture item under discussion, such as noting how the Becky doll is actually more "able" (as it has moveable joints) than regular Barbie (who, in comparison, has limited movement and stiff limbs). Although each chapter is distinct from the other in terms of its popular culture topic, Ellis chooses texts and items that relate to one another across the book. So the discussion of disability and (Barbie) dolls transitions into Chapter 3, "Contemporary Beautism," where Ellis explores how "beauty is not a trivial issue, [how] it is heavily constructed agent of control and has real consequences for the lived experience of people with disability" (39). Moving away from children's toys, Ellis turns her attention to texts intended for adult consumption, such as the Push Girls reality TV series (which shows how femininity is often emphasized over disability) and the case of Ellen Stohl (the college student with a spinal chord injury who controversially posed for Playboy). Again, each popular culture item is discussed in terms of its relation to the audience's perceptions of the text's performance of disability, as well as of other intersectional identity points like gender, race, and sexuality. There are so many different examples of disability in popular culture addressed in Ellis' book that just noting the highlights requires a much larger space than a book review allows. To mention just a few of the other case studies that struck me as particularly powerful: the exploration of the representation of disability as both difficult and normal in TV shows like Twin Peaks and Friday Night Lights (Chapter 5); uncovering the media silence around the Paralympics (and how the BBC marketing campaign for the London 2012 Paralympics, Meet the Superhumans, sought to change that), and the problematic case of Oscar Pistorius (Chapter 7); and the use of the disability studies concept of the "freak" to frame an analysis of Lady Gaga as a live performer, maker of music videos, and person who very publically went through rehabilitation after hip surgery (Chapter 6). In fact, I actually stopped reading the book to watch the Lady Gaga music videos, "Paparazzi" and "Marry the Night," so that I could better appreciate Ellis' argument that "a key feature of Lady Gaga's performances and personae is to distinguish herself from others by acknowledging that everything is a creation, that nothing about her image is natural" (112). As she does for all of the popular culture case studies, Ellis cites many online comments and articles regarding Lady Gaga's work as both ableist (recuperating disability stereotypes to "get attention") and as a disability positive advocate (normalizing and promoting the sexuality of people with disability). Readers of Wordgathering will probably find Chapter 8, "Disability and Spreadable Media: Access, Representation and Inspiration Porn" particularly interesting. As Ellis defines it, "spreadable media is the forwarding and sharing of news stories or videos among a person's network via social networking and email (142) and, as she argues, spreadable media is impacting the way people learn about and relate to disability. Viral videos and news stories create multiple ways of reading disability and produce further content to circulate and contest as people with disabilities comment on what they have seen or read. Ellis provides an excellent short overview of the disability "blogosphere" and how intersectional politics further shape—or even break up—online communities (such as Feministing, The Gold Fish, Ramp Up) and provide niche platforms for new media web series like The Specials and My Gimpy Life. This chapter also touches on the viral success of Susan Boyle's I Dreamed a Dream performance and her later (and much publicized) diagnosis of Asperger's syndrome, as well as Stella Young's popularization of the phenomenon of "inspiration porn," "where images of people with disability are constructed as inspirational in order to make the non-disabled feel better about themselves" (150). All in all, there are very few popular culture stones unturned by the time Ellis reaches her conclusion. Throughout Disability and Popular Culture, Ellis draws on "both the social and cultural models of disability to urge critical disability theorists to look again at the importance of popular culture to people's sense of selves and identity formation as people with disability," and she argues "that popular culture does contribute to and reflect the disablement of people with disability, and that it is vital to increase the employment of people with disability in the cultural industries" (161). Ellis clearly aimed to write the book in accessible (though still scholarly) language, and she succeeds in producing a text that undergraduate students and interested non-academic readers can follow. The only real disappointment, then, is that the cost of the book is beyond the affordability of most casual readers (a situation all too common with specialized scholarly texts). Nevertheless, if it can be found in your local library or shared among a group of interested individuals, Disability and Popular Culture is an excellent primer for people new to thinking about disability studies and/or popular culture studies. Ellis offers up a starting ground for further, more intensive academic research at the intersection of these two areas. It is also a fun experience to read an academic text that you can set down and then easily view or quickly familiarize yourself with the media under discussion. While I was at times left wanting for Ellis to dig deeper into her analyses, the overall effect of her wide and generous net is to see a coming together of disability narratives across popular culture and the multiple ways in which we can read against dominant ableist representations and actively resist them from defining our lived realities. As the images of disability in popular culture become more varied and more accessible, Ellis proposes that all media is "hackable" and disabled consumers are powerful producers in shaping the narratives of disability to come.
Title: Disability and Popular Culture
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