Thoughts on a local news story

I saw this story on the front cover of a discarded local paper on a bus today. On the surface, it looks like a fairly unremarkable example of the standard local paper sympathy-eliciting disability story - but i think that this one - like many of its kind - has deeper undertones to it.

Anthony Booth, the man who has had his prosthetic legs stolen days before his sister Angela's wedding, has been a wheelchair user since the age of 9 - and, as he's a Paralympic wheelchair racer, it's obvious that that's his strongly preferred method of locomotion, and he's quite likely more "successful" at it than many people with no physical impairment at all are at walking. ("Successful" seems an odd way to put it, but i can't think of a better word - i mean in terms of finding it easy, effortless, something he can comfortably do many miles a day of. Of course, i'm not at all implying that those for whom walking, wheelchair pushing, or whatever their preferred method of locomotion is, is at best painful and difficult are "unsuccessful" because of that - i'm just struggling to escape disablist language. Sapir-Whorf again, methinks...) So, why is it so important to his sister that he "walks her down the aisle"? What purpose has it actually served him to spend so much time, effort and self-cited discomfort on learning to walk on prosthetic legs "without using a stick"?

Is the sister's voice authentic in saying "It's more for him that I'm upset because I know he really wanted to do it"? On the surface, that seems a simple and honest thing to say - but it also has an air of required justification about it, a suggestion that, on some level, she is aware that it would be somehow inappropriate or unjustified to be upset about this "for herself". Has she, perhaps even subconsciously, put pressure on her brother to learn to walk when he himself - wheelchair user since childhood and professional athlete who has thus essentially built a huge part of his identity around being a wheelchair user - might well have preferred to play his role in her wedding ceremony using his own comfortable, "normal" method of moving, rather than walking on "uncomfortable" prosthetics because he "wanted it to be the way she wanted".

Also, the whole focus of the story is the theft of his prosthetic legs, but it glosses over the fact that his wheelchair was also inside the van that was stolen. It doesn't say whether it was his Paralympic racing wheelchair - it's probably more likely that it was the wheelchair he used for ordinary, everyday locomotion - but, given that in 24 years of being a double amputee, he apparently hasn't wanted to learn to walk with prosthetics until recently, i strongly suspect that the loss of his wheelchair would have been a far more significant loss for him in terms of everyday mobility than that of his legs.

Going a bit further, why does she feel such a need to have a male relative "walk her down the aisle" anyway? Has she stopped to question the roots and implications of this custom - of women as property of the men around them, and marriage as a ceremonial handing over of woman-as-property from her father, brother or whatever male relative "ownership" defaults to in a patriarchal inheritance system, to her husband? Does she conceptualise herself that way - and, if not, does the survival of patriarchal customs marking women as chattel, even as arguably decontextualised and now-effectively-meaningless bits of ritual, still contribute to oppressive attitudes and actions on the part of those men and internalised self-oppression on the part of those women who uncritically accept and perpetuate those customs?

How many people, reading this "human interest" story, will take for granted the assumptions - about marriage, about disability, about what obligations are and should be part of family relationships - that it contains - that although Anthony Booth found walking on prosthetic legs "uncomfortable", it was right that he should have mimicked the locomotion of a non-disabled person - putting the appearance of normality before his own ease and comfort of movement - to play the part expected of him by his family in a patriarchally normative ritual, and that it is a tragedy and a scandal that he was prevented from doing so (although perhaps not so much that he had his primary means of mobility taken from him)?

There's nothing particularly important or remarkable about this one, small local news story - it's just an example of the many levels of assumptions and prescriptive social norms embedded in what seem like trivial examples of simple, factual reporting - all of which can be unpacked or deconstructed to show biases that go largely unquestioned in mainstream media and mainstream society. There are stories that can be similarly unpacked in every newspaper (magazine, TV news broadcast, etc.) every day. The purpose of deconstructing this superficially trivial story isn't to attack Angela Booth or the Manchester Evening News - it's to highlight that the way the mainstream news reports stories, concerning not just disability and other marginalised identities, but also "normal" and generally-approved-of customs such as marriage, is not "neutral" or "objective", but - even if it does not do so consciously - defends and upholds privileged constructions of what is valued and devalued.

The same local paper which makes a headline out of an individual disabled person's mobility aids being stolen has failed to report on the collective theft of huge amounts of money in tax and benefits from disabled (and otherwise poor and marginalised) people by the UK's new government in its "emergency" budget, and also didn't report the collective direct action taken by disabled people last week in Manchester city centre against the exploitation of disabled people by contracts between government and big business (notably, the independent, community-run Manchester Mule did.). Is this because an individual thief is easier to vilify than an entire system which has theft and violence at its very foundation? Because disabled people are more newsworthy as individualised "victims" (of individual criminality, not of systemic oppression) than as organised activists fighting back? Or merely because certain news stories fit easily into stereotypical formulae, and it's easier and "safer" to keep to such established, non-boat-rocking narratives than to report on anything more "challenging"?

I want to get into the relationship between activism and the media, and the thorny questions of how and whether to engage with corporate/mainstream media and/or simply create our own, here, but i think that's for another post, and i'm still not quite back into "regular" blogging. I will hopefully get back into at least semi-regular posting in the near-ish future, tho...