Disability, Obesity and Ageing: Popular Media Identifications (Cultural Politics of Media and Popular Culture)

Disability, Obesity and Ageing offers an engaging account of a new area of pressing concern, analysing the way in which ’spurned’ identities are depicted and reacted to in televisual genres and online forums. Examining the symbolic power of the media, this book presents case studies from drama, situation comedies, reality and documentary television programmes popular in the UK, USA and Australia to shed light on the representation of disability, obesity and ageing, and the manner in which their status as unwanted and unwelcome identities is perpetuated. A theoretically sophisticated exploration of television as a translator of identity, and the exploration of identity categories in allied virtual spaces, this book will be of interest to sociologists, as well as scholars of popular culture, and cultural and media studies.

Debbie Rodan is Senior Lecturer of Media and Cultural Studies at Edith Cowan University, Australia. She has published on televisual representations, media activist forums and political blogging, and is the author of Identity and Justice: Conflicts, Contradictions and Contingencies. Katie Ellis is Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Internet Studies at Curtin University, Australia. She has published widely on disability and media, and is the author of Disabling Diversity, and co-author of Disability and New Media and Disability and the Media. Pia Lebeck tutors in the Department of Communication and Media Studies at Murdoch University, Australia.