Radar - Loughborough University's contemporary arts research programme - has commissioned artists Sophie Hoyle and Christopher Samuel to make new work as part of 'Gendered re-presentations of disability: Equality, empowerment and marginalisation in Paralympic media'. The Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project is led by Dr Emma Pullen, Lecturer in Sport Management in Loughborough University's School of Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences.
The project uses an intersectional approach to interrogate the dominance of particular kinds of disabled bodies (white, physically athletic, technologically enhanced) in Paralympic media cultures; and seeks to generate new insights into re-representations of gendered, raced and queer disabled subjectivities.
Hoyle and Samuel's practices explore and call into being politicized modes of disabled subjectivity as they intersect with processes of racialization, class, queerness and gender. Their works for this project will take as their starting point data collected by Pullen, along with the project's Research Associate Laura Mora. This consists of analyses of media coverage of the 2020 Tokyo Paralympics (held in 2021), interviews with para athletes, and focus groups with disabled people. The works will first be shown at an event at Loughborough University London in late summer 2022, alongside the launch of the project's summary report.
*Article originally published at: https://radar.lboro.ac.uk/projects/gendered-re-presentations-of-disability/