Oh boy am I glad we get two semesters to work on this.
Summary of the research: Disabilities have bad reputation in media. I want to demonstrate that evidence and create better representation for those with disabilities in terms of creating a superhero story.
A little more detail: Disabilities have a loooot of things going wrong for them in media. For stories set in worlds where people get powers or have abilities, a lot of disabilities get healed (think Spider-Man no longer needing glasses after getting his powers), go away (think Max from Stranger Things being able to walk fine with no limp soon after waking up from a coma she was in for TWO YEARS), don’t matter as the person gets abilities to make up for the disability (is Daredevil really blind if he has advanced sensing abilities), and other various bad representations of disabilities.
In stories, disabilities are rarely seen or talked about. But when they are, there are some not great things going on. Like amputees always getting prosthetics, deaf people always getting hearing aids, autism shown in a specific way despite there being a spectrum, and so on. Even if the story is based on a real person, if it is made into a TV show or film things are changed to make the story more interesting.
For horror or super hero stories, a lot of villains have some sort of physical disability. Lots of scars, limps, hunched backs, or other deformities.
In social media, comments in videos of those who are disabled are a hit or miss. Some are supportive while others go the typical internet troll route.
Overall, a bad rep in media for representation, which leads to a lack of understanding. These people don’t get their voices heard, especially not when certain disabilities are thought of to be connected to villains.
So, the research is going to be presenting all these various examples of media doing disabilities a disservice with a deeper dive on the super hero representation of disabilities, as that genre tends to have a bigger pool of disability representation to analyze.
And then, after showing how much it all sucks, I plan to go into social media and look up how people feel about certain characters being disabled. Like, does the blind community think Daredevil is blind? Is he good representation? For those with deformities, does the Thing feel more like them than other characters with deformities? Clayface? Do they do deformities justice, with them being seen as/called monsters? How does the autism community feel about Mr. Fantastic, with all these examples of autistic people being very smart? Just get a vibe for what works or doesn’t work with the disabled community to know how to do the next part.
Which is then to take all this evidence of how representation sucks and the feedback from people and create a story that will do some justice. I doubt it would be perfect, but it will hopefully be better than what is already out there. Research and a creative aspect is the goal.
I am doing a lot, and I will probably lean more towards Marvel than DC to try and limit the super hero pool. DC I really know Batman, and not much else. Marvel I know more generally, so I feel like I can talk about all that better.
I also have to decide what I will count as a disability in terms of “do mental illnesses count”?
Cause if so, we got a LOT more to discuss. So many heroes and villains have PTSD and other various mental disorders. So many just mention it in the paper and be like “that is a whole other research paper”. Mention it just so mental illnesses don’t get ignored, but just mention it and not a deep dive so I can actually manage to get all this done.
Looking back I found a lot of stuff on deafness for the lit review, I should totally add more. More on deformities, more on the villain aspect of disabilities, more on the representation not being accurate, more is always good. I could always find more stuff. I haven’t touched the social media aspect yet, but that will probably be done before getting more literature, as I feel like the disability spaces will bring forward things I didn’t consider.
That is what my plan is/my idea of where my research is going at the moment. Demonstrate the poor disability representation, get feedback from the community, make a better story.
