1st Edition
Disability, Obesity and Ageing Popular Media Identifications
Disability, Obesity and Ageing offers an engaging account of a new area of pressing concern, analysing the way in which ’spurned’ identities are depicted and reacted to in televisual genres and online forums. Examining the symbolic power of the media, this book presents case studies from drama, situation comedies, reality and documentary television programmes popular in the UK, USA and Australia to shed light on the representation of disability, obesity and ageing, and the manner in which their status as unwanted and unwelcome identities is perpetuated. A theoretically sophisticated exploration of television as a translator of identity, and the exploration of identity categories in allied virtual spaces, this book will be of interest to sociologists, as well as scholars of popular culture, and cultural and media studies.
Biography
Debbie Rodan is Senior Lecturer of Media and Cultural Studies at Edith Cowan University, Australia. She has published on televisual representations, media activist forums and political blogging, and is the author of Identity and Justice: Conflicts, Contradictions and Contingencies. Katie Ellis is Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Internet Studies at Curtin University, Australia. She has published widely on disability and media, and is the author of Disabling Diversity, and co-author of Disability and New Media and Disability and the Media. Pia Lebeck tutors in the Department of Communication and Media Studies at Murdoch University, Australia.
’This is one of the most original, engaged and compelling discussions of the contemporary landscape of disability I have read. Rodan, Ellis and Lebeck deftly fold diverse media and cultural contexts together in order to offer an astute, discerning picture of the way popular culture creates particular bodies as other. A brilliant and truly global piece of scholarship, this book is a must for those interested in disability, obesity, ageing, and the mediatization of politics of becoming "other".' Anna Hickey-Moody, University of Sydney, Australia ’This thoughtful, accessible book engages with television’s constructions of what it is to live with disability, obesity and/or an ageing body, and argues that the meanings of these categories are subject to constant negotiation. Resistance is not futile!’ Lelia Green, Edith Cowan University, Australia
