ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at disabled performers who create entertainment programming for the internet and streaming television. The chapter uses the work of three disabled performers to illustrate the Affirmative Model of Disability. This model of disability confronts the marginalization of disabled people trying to work in the entertainment television and film industry for decades. With new media platforms that have fewer gatekeepers, modern disabled creators are finding value and empowerment exploring their disability identity in self-created content. Through innovative web series, comedy performances, Netflix shows, and more, these disabled creators affirm their lived experiences of disability and its authentic place in media culture. British disability and inclusion scholars John Swain and Sally French, who created the Affirmative Model of Disability, say that through the creation of media and art, disabled artists challenge the cultural barriers and societal oppression that shape disabled people’s identities. The chapter focuses on three primary disabled creators, Teal Sherer, Ryan O’Connell, and Hannah Gadsby. American disabled actress Teal Sherer, who is a wheelchair user, faced down inaccessible Hollywood when she tried to break into the entertainment industry in 2005 and after. Her connection with a successful YouTube series, The Guild, gave her the idea to make her own trials and tribulations as a disabled actor into a YouTube series. The result is two seasons of the short-form web series, My Gimpy Life 2012, 2014. Sherer is a pioneer who was leveraging the relatively new media platform of YouTube for entertainment content. Autistic queer comedian Hannah Gadsby’s journey from Tasmania, Australia, to international fame came from her authentic stories told through her Netflix comedy specials, Nanette (2018) and Douglas (2020). Gadsby’s out and proud performance of autism in Douglas relates to the way the Affirmative Model of Disability empowers disabled artists to no longer keep their disabilities a secret and to visibly embrace their disability identity to counter an assimilationist society. Gadsby uses her neurodiverse brain to give audiences perceptive comedy and thus affirms the legitimacy of the autistic community’s authentic autistic experiences through her own. In a Netflix short-form series, Special (2019–2021), American writer/actor Ryan O’Connell explores his story of being a gay writer with mild cerebral palsy, who was closeted about his disability. Because their content appears on the streaming platform Netflix, O’Connell, like Gadsby, had much creative control.
