By Grace Sirman
DIGITAL 357
Project Description: Ever since I was a kid, I have always consumed a lot of entertainment and content. I watched every movie, read every book, played every game I could get my hands on, and this resulted in a passion for storytelling and art. When I got older, and became disabled, I noticed that while the presence of disabled characters increased, their accuracy and humanizing portrayals were still not as common.
To get a broader sense of this phenomenon, I created a survey through Google Forms that aims to investigate perceptions of disabled representation in popular media, focusing on identifying common tropes, stereotypes, and the impact of such portrayals. Participation involves answering questions about various aspects of disabled representation, including identifying specific characters, recognition of stereotypes, and assessment of good versus bad representation. The collected data will inform the creation of an illustrated poster highlighting prevalent tropes and providing critical commentary on disabled representation.
This is the Google Form I created: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdgbqK6ZwuU4UXgPrJL-tksplY1MPcC0d85SruyWz-DehMXMw/viewform?vc=0&c=0&w=1&flr=0
Process: When creating the questions, I knew that I wanted to collect data that considered general questions like whether or not the participant identified as disabled themselves, to see if that had an effect on their answers. I also wanted to determine how successfully participants thought the industry represented disability. Before getting to the questions referencing specific tropes, I wanted to observe how participants felt about the “does representation matter debate in regards to disability, since it’s integral to this topic.
Results: To start, I first asked participants to name any disabled character from a movie, television show, or video game off the top of their head, good or bad. Out of my 15 responses, the most common answer people thought of was Arthur “Artie” Abrams, from Glee (2009), and Toph Beifong from Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005).
I asked participants to assess whether the character they could think of would be considered “good” or “bad” representation. Characters like Artie were considered “bad” due to the actor portraying him not actually using a wheelchair in real life, as well as the problematic scenes involving Artie fantasizing about walking, standing and dancing out of his chair.
Toph was met with better reception, since the show handled her disability with a realistic level of adaptation and adjusting to her blindness by using her feet to sense vibrations in the ground, and avoiding manipulative narratives.
Finally, I made a checklist of commonly used tropes and archetypes within media I have personally seen, and asked participants to check off which ones they have ever observed.
Illustration: Using all of these responses, I created an illustration that summarized the specific traits or narratives to look for when considering a disabled character, and created a character that looks like the most typical disabled individual.
I made my character a conventionally attractive, white cisgender male, with a clear physical disability, since this seems to be the most used depiction in regards to disability. I noticed that this seems to be more popular than depicting other disabilities like invisible illnesses or intellectual disabilities.
Conclusion: I was really pleased with the amount of responses especially considering the short notice, as well as the level of writing that was necessary to complete the form. Initially, I was worried that the responses would be short, vague, or unhelpful, but most of the participants put a lot of effort into their responses. This project helped me realize and better understand how disabilities are represented, and gave me some insight on how to best represent disabled characters in my own projects.
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