Scan the following sites, choose one topic to reaserch and answer these questions. Or find your own sites.
What attitudes, interpretations, and conclusions are built into a media message about people with disabilities?
What personal needs and anxieties, pleasures or troubles of the day, racial and sexual attitudes, family and cultural background, moral standpoint, and so forth do individuals bring to what they read, watch or listen to in a media portrayal of people with disabilities?
Who owns and controls the media message?
What ideological or value messages are built into the media portrayal?
What are implications in the message about people with disabilities that might affect political and social change?.
How do the text and images contribute to the construction a portrayal of people with disabilities?
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Defying stereotypes: the way forward
"Disabled people should be shown as an ordinary part of life in all forms of representation, not as stereotypes or invisible."
In films, disabled people rarely have a character other than as defined by variations of the stereotypes above. The following guidelines have been offered by disabled people as a starting point for portraying them in a non-stereotyped way.
1. Shun one-dimensional characterisations. Portray disabled people as having complex personalities capable of a full range of emotions.
2. Avoid depicting us as always receiving. Show us as equals, giving as well as receiving.
3. Avoid presenting physical and mental characteristics as determining personality.
4. Refrain from depicting us as objects of curiosity. Make us ordinary. Our impairments should not be ridiculed or made the butt of jokes.
5. Avoid sensationalising us, especially as victims or perpetrators of violence.
6. Refrain from endowing us with superhuman attributes.
7. Avoid Pollyanna-ish plots that make our attitude the problem. Show the barriers we face in society that keep us from living full lives.
8. Avoid showing disabled people as non-sexual. Show us in loving relationships and expressing the same range of sexual needs and desires as non-disabled people.
9. Show us as an ordinary part of life in all forms of representation.
10. Most importantly, cast us, train us and write us into your scripts, programmes and publications.