The Victim, The Villain and The Comedian: Disability in Film
Name three disabled characters that appear regularly on prime time TV… Now ask yourself if they’re played by a Disabled actor and finally ask if they’re represented positively. Are they unapologetically disabled? Or are they waiting to be saved from the grasps of neurodiversity? Or are they the ‘funny one’? Disability is undoubtedly underrepresented in the mainstream media with only 3% of series regulars on TV shows having disabilities [GLAAD, 2019] to put this in perspective that means out of 879 surveyed shows only 27 people on screen are disabled. Out of this 3%, 95% of the characters are played by non-disabled actors and a large majority of characters on screen fall into overused and ultimately harmful tropes concerning disability. This forces us to ask the question on whether disability is actually being represented on screen as well as what is prohibiting these companies from being more accessible; both in front of and behind the screens. In this essay, I will be focusing on The ...