The Singaporean Paralympics and Its Media Portrayal: Real Sport? Men-Only?

Abstract

This article explores the discursive representations of Paralympians in South East Asia, particlarly in Singapore. One goal is to look at the extent and nature of media coverage of the Paralympics. Another goal of the research is to examine whether female Paralympians are exposed to the dual burden of sexist and ablest ideology in the media. Over 2 years, data from 100 articles were collected from three local Singaporean and Asian media sources; additionally, interviews and a survey were conducted with both Paralympians and citizens from the disabled community as well as a cohort of nondisabled Singaporean citizens. Findings suggest that coverage of Paralympic sport is significantly low, and that patriotism is more starkly linked to the Paralympics than the Olympics. Findings also suggest that othering (presenting the disabled as passive as well as challenged), or the supercrip narrative is apparent. Disabled women athletes tend to be overrepresented in passive poses out of the sport field. Finally, and more positively, the study finds that there are many images of Paralympian women as sophisticated and attractive without being sexually provocative. Therefore, evidence of sexual objectification or presentation of asexual disabled women tends not to be as present, as other similar studies have found.

Newspaper Coverage of Paralympic Athletes: A Multimodal Discourse Analysis

“…The number of selected articles for analysis was merely 47 (articles with news photographs), from a total of 55 articles published during the 2012 Paralympic Games and 57 during the 2016 Games. However, these numbers are consistent with coverage of past Paralympic Games involving other countries: for example there were 68 articles in four German newspapers and 36 articles in four French newspapers during the 1996 Paralympic Games (Schantz & Gilbert, 2001), 62 articles in four British newspapers during the 2000 Sydney Paralympic Games (Thomas & Smith, 2003), and 70 articles in a Singaporean newspaper depicting Paralympic athletes collected over the span of 2 years, that is, with a mean of 35 articles collected per year (Brooke, 2018). Even though these are just raw figures across different cultural media contexts, they are comparable because all of them are newspaper articles reporting about Paralympic Games and athletes.…”

“…To some degree, depicting heroic acts may trigger nationalist sentiment. This defined Paralympic athletes, according to Brooke (2018), who highlighted the link with succeeding, overcoming hardship in a dramatic way, and intense emotional expression.…”

Extraordinary Normalcy, Ableist Rehabilitation, and Sporting Ablenationalism: The Cultural (Re)Production of Paralympic Disability Narratives

“…A review of Paralympic studies focusing on representation (e.g., Berger, 2008;Beacom et al, 2016;Brooke, 2018;Howe, 2011;Silva & Howe, 2012;Marques et al, 2015;McGillivray et al, 2019;Solves et al, 2019;Ellis, 2009;Kim et al, 2017) demonstrates the widespread application of the supercrip as an analytic concept across a range of media platforms; from television (e.g. Quinn & Yoshida, 2016;Ellis, 2009), to printed media (Beacom et al, 2016;Misener, 2012), to promotion and marketing (Silva & Howe 2012).…”

Materiality, mediation and affective encounters: ‘Rising Phoenix’ and the cultural representation of disability

“…Particular attention has been afforded to the Paralympic Games and Para sport 1 – a hyper-visible site of disability media representation that attracts a global audience (Kolotouchkina et al, 2021). In doing so, scholars have provided important insights into the way Paralympic representation operates as a persuasive pedagogical site in shaping everyday disability knowledge(s) through relations of power, ideology and meaning (see Beacom et al, 2016; Brooke, 2019; Kolotouchkina et al, 2021; Silva and Howe, 2012).…”

“…Paralympic media research has been largely limited to more traditional poststructuralist paradigmatic frameworks centred on debates concerning discourse and ideology in the politics and pedagogy of disability representation (Howe, 2011; Howe and Silva, 2017; McGillivray et al, 2021). For the most part, cultural critique has been focused on the prevalence of disability narratives and discourses in Para sport broadcasting, print media and marketing (see Brooke, 2019; Kolotouchkina et al, 2021; McGillivray et al, 2021) and the visibility and normalisation of some Para athletes within discourses of Nationalism (Kolotouchkina et al, 2021) and Ableism (Howe and Silva, 2017). Whilst this body of work has offered important contributions to Paralympic and Para sport media scholarship it has yet to adequately engage with the way ‘the visual serves as a gateway to broader somatic experiences’ (Heywood, 2015: 24) that give performative force to aspects of our mediated experience.…”