Writing Institutionalization and Disability in the Canadian Culture Industry: (Re)producing (Absent) Story

Abstract

From the lens of a non-survivor ally who is also a journalist, activist, sister, and educator, I offer a reflexive account of reconciling with failed media activism. By applying Horkheimer and Adorno's (1972) concept of the culture industry to my own experience of pitching a story about the impending closure of Saskatchewan's Valley View Centre to a Canadian publication, this article investigates the theoretical underpinnings of a Canadian culture industry confronted with the politics of institutionalization, survivorship, and intellectual disability. The culture industry operates on the inclusionist premise that the public needs to understand cultural locations of disability that bestow an artificial sense of bodily agency on the spectator, thus placing media producers in "expert" roles by culture industry standards. This article combines memory and critical theory in a writing-story that addresses the unresolvable task of un/covering disability's presence and absence in a journalistic practice that cannot penetrate the walls of an institution. KeywordsDisability, journalism, culture industry, survivor narratives, institutionalization Jones, Writing Survivorship CJDS 6.3 (August 2017) 151 Kevin if he wanted to be written about as an object under provincial policy that forces people with intellectual disabilities toward the margins"-referring specifically to rules set by the 1995Saskatchewan Education Act that disqualify special education diploma holders from accessing post-secondary schooling. I suggested that these policies, which make special education diplomas badges of unemployability, were an expression of working-class disavowal.The story was about the political structures that make it impossible for special education graduates like Kevin to fit into the income-generating, neoliberal citizenship model that disability rights groups have fought for in Canada for decades, paired with my general sense of uselessness in witnessing the failure of the state, activism, and myself in creating possibilities for citizenship for Kevin (Prince, 2012). More discreetly, the pitch was also about my growing sense of disappointment in how stories about intellectual disability are framed in a journalistic context, where such stories are often told through specific, stereotypical and generally uncritical tropes, and where people like Kevin are rarely invited to tell their own stories outside of these tropes (Clogston, 1991;Devotta, Wilton, & Yiannakoulias, 2013;Haller, 2010;Jones, 2014; Sgroi, Jones, Writing Survivorship CJDS 6.3 (August 2017) 153 2016). I was feeling caught between my roles of journalist and advocate, and I tried to write my way through this tension.The pitch was accepted. The magazine's pro-union edge meant, of course, that although it seemed to me that my brother was generally unsupported by labour activism in the province, Ihad to figure out if perhaps, all these years, my family just hadn't sought support in the right places. Perhaps I was simply wrong. Perhaps I could uncover new advo...

Representing Disability, D/deaf, and Mad Artists and Art in Journalism: Identifying Ableist Fault Lines and Promising Crip Practices of Representation

“…In Canada, there is a fractured relationship between disability communities and journalists (Boyer, 1988;Jones, 2014Jones, , 2017. These groups have struggled to communicate with one another, and debates about misrepresentation of disabled people characterize much of this relationship (Jones, 2020).…”