Speakers
Description
In a cultural moment characterised by heightened mediated marketability via a social media 'self', Para athletes are increasingly using platforms such as Instagram and TikTok to (self-)represent and promote their sporting identities and public image. In doing so, a number of Para athletes have engaged audiences in disability counter-narratives that actively resist dominant stereotypes around disability. This is particularly the case at the intersection of athleticism, gender, and sexuality where Para athletes are reclaiming and performing gendered and sexualised identities in new and diverse ways. Whilst there exists a burgeoning field of research on Paralympic media, to date there have been very few studies focusing on Para athletes’ online self-representation. In this presentation, we contribute to this area of inquiry through an intersectional visual media analysis of the top 30 most popular British Para athlete Instagram pages. We pay attention to the ways in which discourses of heteronormativity, gender and race intersect with disability in the promotion of athletes' online self through the lens of (feminist/queer) 'crip theory’ (Puar, 2017), microcelebrity studies (Marwick, 2015), and Banet-Weiser’s (2015) gendered ‘economies of visibility’. We interrogate the extent to which heteronormative scripts centred on racial privilege, heteronormativity, kinship normativity and consumption (‘branding’) capabilities operate to shape emerging discourses around Paralympic sport, mediated disability and new (online) disabled normativities. Importantly, we discuss what this means for the role Para athletes’ self-representation can and does play in shaping disability representation in relation to the subversive and emancipatory potential of such imagery on wider cultural disability discourses and representational politics.
