Disability and Popular Culture

by Katie Ellis

Published 28 December 2014

As a response to real or imagined subordination, popular culture reflects the everyday experience of ordinary people and has the capacity to subvert the hegemonic order. Drawing on central theoretical approaches in the field of critical disability studies, this book examines disability across a number of internationally recognised texts and objects from popular culture, including film, television, magazines and advertising campaigns, children’s toys, music videos, sport and online spaces, to attend to the social and cultural construction of disability.

While acknowledging that disability features in popular culture in ways that reinforce stereotypes and stigmatise, Disability and Popular Culture celebrates and complicates the increasing visibility of disability in popular culture, showing how popular culture can focus passion, create community and express defiance in the context of disability and social change.

Covering a broad range of concerns that lie at the intersection of disability and cultural studies, including media representation, identity, the beauty myth, aesthetics, ableism, new media and sport, this book will appeal to scholars and students interested in the critical analysis of popular culture, across disciplines such as disability studies, sociology and cultural and media studies.


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.