Disability in the news: a reconsideration of reading

By making use of a disability studies perspective informed by phenomenology, this paper interrogates the social process of reading news articles that depict disability as if it is only limit. The paper begins from my experience of reading an article that assumes reader-willingness to imagine disability as a kind of limit without possibility, without life. I go on to consider how the meaning of disability is actually produced by normative forms of cultural perception that recognize certain bodies as a kind of negation. Reading, a common mode of perception within literate western cultures, is used to problematize how mainstream media configures embodiment. Finally, the paper raises the ever present possibility that the ways in which impaired bodies are typically limited may contain the possibility of alternatives that disturb and re-make the everyday modes of perceiving disability.