Introduction

Introduction

Every culture and even every genre of media contains many sets of stock characters. The inclusion of such a cast is often criticised, yet is indispensable. Without pre-fabricated characters, books, cinema, and artwork would have to include long and cumbersome explanations of every person involved, and would lose the interest of much of the audience. These stock cast members are usually comprised of a combination of typical linguistic, physical, and logistical features such as lexicon, tone, physique, height, hair length and colour, and the way in which people move and interact with their environments. Using these markers, the audience can ascertain the general background and habits of a character otherwise unintroduced.

Some of these stock characters present positive images and portrayals of groups, designed to help break down negative stereotypes. Other times, they can be quite pernicious, such as the assumption that people of certain groups have poor social skills, or that one group is less intellectually capable than another. However, the majority of these stock features are neither positive nor negative; they merely exist as requisite elements in entertainment and literature. For example, if a man and woman are introduced to a film and are holding hands or standing very close to one another, the audience can safely assume that they are somehow amorously related. This is neither helpful nor hurtful, it is simply a means by which the director imparts essential information to his audience without long and drawn out explanations.

This page will focus on one such group: disabled persons and how they have been portrayed in Western media, both recent and ancient, and whether the predominant representation of disability has been positive, negative, neutral or mixed. By surveying numerous documents, cinematic and literary, as well as the academic research on the matter, this page will seek to demonstrate that throughout Western history there has been a mixed representation of disabled people in popular media, and that  the representations have not meaningfully changed since the middle ages, except perhaps to become more derogatory since the introduction of the horror genre of literature and cinema.

This flies in the face of modern preconceptions of medieval practices, from which modern thinkers usually attempt to differentiate themselves. It is commonly held that the middle ages were a time of backwardness, superstition, ignorance, and darkness. Such ethnocentricity, while natural, is also tragic, because such arrogance means that valuable insights both from other cultures and from our own past are often overlooked. In this case modern thinkers deride their own progenitors to help justify their modernity. As a result, Boivin and Phillips (2007) note that:

Medieval writers are usually excluded from conversations about mental disorder because the medieval period is dismissed by  psychology and psychiatry texts as focused exclusively on supernatural explanations… [yet, as these authors purport] medieval descriptions of mental disorder can illuminate present day efforts to develop a more holistic understanding (359).

The medieval period has much to offer and was anything but a time of darkness and ignorance. The literature left behind by our forebearers illuminates a complex and colourful world in which peoples interacted, learned, produced beautiful pieces of artwork, and cared for one another. Nowhere is this more evident than in the portrayal of disabled persons.

In both modern and medieval literature there is a multiplicity of views of disability. Some view it as evil (for example horror films and book), some present disabled persons as victims without agency, some as those to be pitied, and still others as active and valuable members of society, able to control their own fates. However, most commonly authors present combinations of these four major categories. As will be seen in the sources documented on this website, perceptions of disability in Western media have always been mixed, however, with the inception of the horror genre, they seem to have taken a turn for the worse, and it can only be hoped that more positive films, such as Forrest Gump, can eclipse the more numerous and negative ones.

The following chart includes every document discussed on this website (in chronological order) with its placement into the generalised categories of representation which will be used on this website.