Chapter 1: Not Enough
Though I lack the resources to watch every American and British love reality show of all time, I can assure you that contestants with disabilities are incredibly rare. After an exhausting exploit into this task, which consisted of me watching first episodes of seasons of the Bachelorette and wearily recording “able-bodied” for all two dozen contestants on a spreadsheet, I decided that my research assets would be better concentrated elsewhere. Though specific, definitive data on the quantity of disabled people in love/dating reality television, I can confirm that disabled people are certainly underrepresented from my difficulty in securing even two instances for this study.
But why is statistically significant representation important? Preliminary studies indicate that representation on-screen impacts the self-esteem of represented individuals. A 2012 study published in Communications research found that watching television increased the self-esteem of some children, specifically white males. Other groups of children—boys of color, girls of color, and white girls—were adversely affectedly television exposure, recording decreasing levels of self-worth. Michael Brody of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry suggested that representation was perhaps the biggest factor in the research results: “Kids are impressionable. It affects them when they don’t see themselves represented on TV, and it affects them when the young people who look like them are seen doing something wrong.” Following Brody’s logic, the misrepresentation of disabled people on television could strongly impact disabled television viewers. Their depiction as either absent or vilified could have strong implications for the mental health and self-confidence of the disabled community. Nicole Martins of Indiana University links this study to the sociological concept of symbolic annihilation— “the idea that if you don’t see people like you in the media you consume, you must somehow be unimportant.” The symbolic annihilation of disability on television contributes to the marginalization of disabled people in society
Yet other researchers appeal more to emotion than logic when considering why representation in television matters. “I think the moral argument is self-evident,” contends former professor Michael Morgan, “Stories effect how we live our lives, how we see other people, how we think about ourselves.” If these stories exclude a marginalized group, however, the prolonged effect can become dangerous: “Over and over and over, week after week, month after month, year after year, it sends a very clear message, not only to members of those groups, but to members of other groups, as well,” Morgan claims. By excluding disabled people from representation on television, specifically representation of love/dating reality TV, we perpetuate the untruth that disabled people are not important or contributory members of society.