ABSTRACT
Research examining intersecting social identities of gender, sexual orientation, and physical ability is woefully lacking. This chapter critically responds to a lack of disability representation across mass media production and content – and interrogates harmful stereotypes perpetuated in a US-based reality TV show, Push Girls. Content analysis and hermeneutic phenomenological theme analysis findings reported in this chapter suggest that Sex Object and Supercrip stereotypes enabled producers to create programming for audiences otherwise repelled by images of women using wheelchairs. Hence, the way the Push Girls content was crafted fails to deliver on an implied egalitarian promise. Implications of these findings as they relate to stereotype use among audiences and disabilities community are undergirded by critical race theory and feminist theory critique.
