Frances Bolton (PHI) wrote:
> Has anyone seen the new Benetton ads? A few years ago they did they ad
> with the guy who was just about to die of AIDS. Now they've got a 2 page
> color ad of a laughing child with Down's, and another of a child who looks
> like s/he might have CP, cradled in the arms of a woman.
>
This kind of positive image about disability is the result of years of hard work to promote the image of disabled people as "people" not subhuman things. I worked as director of operations for the Media Access Office for a period of time in which much of my job was to educate the movie industry about negative stereotypes of disability. One of :our" historians Dr. Paul Longmore has compiled and analyzed thousands and thousands of films that contain a character with a disability, the vast majority of which sterotype disability and are extremely negative. For instance, disability is commonly used as a metaphor for evil, for instance Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, Captain Hook, etc.
The fact that Benetton feels comfortable endorsing a product by using a baby with downs in an ad is due to the disability rights movement.
Marta