Partnership Magazine in 1993

Accentuating the Positive

Recently much has been written about how negative the images of disability are that surround us - be they TV, cinema, advertising, literary or even radio - but what are the alternatives? I do not wish to claim that current images are positive but neither are those being offered as alternatives. Both Jenny Morris and Colin Barnes, in their respective recent publications, offer various examples of positive imagery which basically consist of people with disabilities replacing an able-bodied actor in a role which was either written/intended for someone who was able-bodied or that was non-specific. The most often cited examples of this are American advertisements in which people with learning difficulties are seen ordering a MacDonalds or where a wheelchair using basketball player wears NIKE sports shoes. But are these images positive? To answer this we must try and decipher what is 'positive' about such images.

It is difficult to see anything other than a kind of "we're really like you" philosophy coming out of these supposed positive images. Such an ethos is OK for those of us who are easily capable of either passing ourselves off, or things we do, as normal (be that heterosexual activity/marriage or simply not dribbling), but what if we cannot do that or don't have the slightest wish to. What we must all try and remember is that 'normality' is a cage that we are locked out of and one that those who consider themselves 'normal' are locked in. The aim, at least as an ideal, must surely be to eradicate the cage and free us all from the narrow, rigid, and inhumane categories which we all made to suffer under. The "normal body" not only controls our lives (through discrimination against those who do not have it) but also those who have it (through the retribution it will receive if it fails to be normal, through fear). We, as abnormal, must create a philosophy/imagery that is not just "ab" but "anti" normal in order to free our oppressors from themselves; until our oppressors are free from their own illusions and delusions they will never free us from the discrimination and hate that they have for us.

If we translate what I have said in to disability imagery then what we must do, to be positive, is to create images that are usually considered grotesque or extreme or even disgusting (i.e. a defaecating incontinent dribbling incoherently) and saying "Well, what's a matter with that". Because, after all, some of us are like this, some are worse, some are better, it doesn't matter. What matters is that we validate that which is our abnormality so as to be anti-normal; I do not mean that we should be "anti" able-bodied people because they seem to be normal, no, what I mean is that we should be "anti" the idea(l) of normality which represses the individuals', or groups', desires and validation of themselves.

An element of what is a positive image to me is in a horror film called Monkey Shines, although there is a lot wrong with it, it does do what I am suggesting in one sense at least. A young man, due to an accident, develops quadriplegia and becomes impotent (stereotypical so far) but then, instead of just splitting from his girlfriend fulfils her sexually via oral sex. Such a scenario not only breaks the tradition of representation but, and most significantly, also breaks free of a standard morality (heterosexual penetration - reproduction - as the be all and end all of sexuality) which, at the same time as controlling able-bodied sexuality, constructs the asexual/disabled as abject or the 'Other'. There is nothing wrong in being disabled but there is something wrong in passing ourselves of as something we (and they) are not: normal.

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