Disability Duplicity and the Formative Cultural Identity Politics of Generation X (Autocritical Disability Studies)

Disability is history and futurity, culture and society, practice and theory, work and play, an immense desire for life by which body and mind are dragged kicking and screaming into each and every new day.

Using autocritical discourse analysis, a new hybrid research method that combines aspects of the established methods of critical discourse analysis (CDA) and autoethnography, this book explores the formative cultural identity politics of disability via cultural stations of UK popular culture. These cultural stations include action figures, children’s books, television miniseries, comics, comedy films, teenage drama and sitcoms, the punk rock movement, and alternative comedy. Although the cultural stations range from toys and comics to aggressive music and chaotic sitcoms, all are considered with a focus on the language and tropes of disability. Indeed, most of the works are not remembered as portrayals of disability but the book’s analysis reveals flash if not fleeting representations that, when centralised, clarify patterns of duplicity. Via the language of power, and the power of language, all these texts are found to have contributed to the formative cultural identity politics of disability.

It will be of interest to all scholars and students of disability studies, sociology, toy studies, comic studies, humour studies, television studies, popular music studies, gender studies, literary studies, and cultural studies.

David Bolt is Professor of Disability Studies and Interdisciplinarity at Liverpool Hope University, where he is Director of the Centre for Culture and Disability Studies and the Disability Studies MA. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies and his work has been internationally recognised in education, the humanities, and the social sciences.