Sunday’s Styles section of the NY Times asserted that we gimps are getting all uppity and “confrontational” vis-a-vis society’s general discomfort with our gimpiness. The article points out that media depictions of people with disabilities are changing, citing examples like The Amazing Race (which featured a contestant with an amputated leg) and CSI (which features an actor who is also an amputee). Not to put too fine a point on this, but I think it’s fair to say that these people are on television because they’re disabled but not too disabled. The guy on CSI appears perfectly normal until he starts walking. The Amazing Race contestant is still a conventional-looking hottie who happens to be missing a leg. They don’t slur their speech. They don’t drool or piss into a bag. They don’t have oversized heads or undersized bodies. I’m not sure these examples signify some radical paradigm shift in both Hollywood and the larger culture regarding attitudes towards disability. If anything, they represent a very incremental acceptance of people with disabilities. <\/p>\n
The article goes on to say that NBC is developing a sitcom that will feature a cast with a variety of disabilities. If the show uses actors with disabilities and doesn’t shy away from some of the topics that still elicit freak-outs from the public (disability and sexuality is probably the most potent example), I’ll be both surprised and impressed. How viewers react to a blunt treatment of disability is another matter. I guess the present state of affairs is better than the good old days when we were kept out of sight and mind. But I’m also not going to be satisfied with tokenism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sunday’s Styles section of the NY Times asserted that we gimps are getting all uppity and “confrontational” vis-a-vis society’s general discomfort with our gimpiness. The article points out that media depictions of people with disabilities are changing, citing examples like The Amazing Race (which featured a contestant with an amputated leg) and CSI (which features […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1577","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-1-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9Iwau-pr","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1577","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1577"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1577\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1577"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1577"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1577"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}