Melissa Marsden
PhD candidate in the Curtin University School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry. She is currently undertaking research on media representation of Para dressage riders in the Paralympic Games. She is a freelance journalist with degrees in politics, history and journalism.
Email: melissa.marsden@postgrad.curtin.edu.au
Website: https://www.framingthenarrative.com/
Para dressage was first included in the 1996 Atlanta Paralympics as therapy, with participants benefiting from interacting with horses. Athletes with eligible impairments can participate in Para dressage according to different grades of functional capacity. Para dressage is the only para equestrian sport included in the Paralympics. The event has been recognized as “a sport where rider and horse become one”.
In this article, I argue that the relationship between horse and rider in para dressage is so symbiotic that it forces the media to look beyond the usual signifiers of disability and the Paralympics they typically invoke. This interdependence prevents the media from reducing the athletes’ achievements to paralympic media frames of inspiration porn or superhuman achievement. Media can shift dominant discourses of disability by creating narratives that broadly emphasize the value of interdependence between rider, horse, and society.
Media narratives of para equestrian and the Paralympics
Cultural disability theorists David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder argue that disability is produced and reproduced in “cultural sites” where people with disabilities are categorized. The Paralympics are a cultural location of disability and have been instrumental in shaping media narratives of disability. Paralympians often, if not always, have a visible signifier of their disability, such as a wheelchair or prosthesis. These signifiers are then reproduced using media frames. The Paralympics and media coverage have been criticized for furthering an inspiration porn narrative. Australian activist Stella Young first described inspiration porn as:
“An image of a person with a disability, often a kid, doing something completely ordinary – like playing, or talking, or running, or drawing a picture, or hitting a tennis ball – carrying a caption like ‘your excuse is invalid’ or ‘before you quit, try”.
In her landmark Ted X speech, Young argued that inspiration porn was a “lie, propagated by social media” that has influenced society to perceive the achievements of people with disabilities as exceptional. She argued that inspiration porn was the process of “objectifying disabled people for the benefit of non-disabled people”.
Inspiration porn has developed from earlier critical disability studies of the super cripple, defined by David Howe and Carla Filomena Silva as “a stereotype narrative displaying the plot of someone who must “fight his or her impairment” to overcome it and achieve unlikely success”. Typically, this narrative focuses on the individual ‘overcoming’ their impairment. However, in para dressage, athletes do not ‘overcome’ their impairments alone; the skill and ability of the horse are also factors. In para dressage, commentators emphasize how these aids promote the harmony between horse and rider rather than as performance enhancing. The aids permitted only compensate for a rider’s physical impairment or aid safety. Compensation differs from performance enhancement as it only aims to standardize riders’ physical abilities within their grades. Drawing on Susan Wendell’s and others’ work, we observe that these aids do not compensate; instead, they illustrate interspecies interdependence. In doing so, para dressage athletes can neither be so easily reduced to inspiration porn nor elevated to super cripple status.
Interdependence
Human-inter-species interdependence for a person with a disability is common in media portrayals of people with disabilities, e.g. guide dogs. In contrast, in para dressage, neither the horse nor rider can perform without the other. For interdependence, there needs to be an equal partnership between a person with a disability and an animal. Academic and disability activist Sunaura Taylor argues that interdependency is “self-sufficiency”.
Susan Wendell’s interdependence analysis demonstrates the false dichotomy of independence and dependence by illustrating the “value in being dependent on others and being depended on”. Wendell argues that “independence,” like “disability,” is defined according to society’s expectations about what people “normally” do for themselves and how they do it”. Wendell argues that although these ideals of normalcy have advantages, [independence] “undervalues relationships of dependency or interdependence”.
Para dressage riders’ horses help them be self-sufficient and make them feel physically stronger. Beatrice Vincenzi et al. argue that interdependence illustrates how “bodies, technologies, settings, etc., are unceasingly entwined to make actors more or less able.” Through interspecies interdependence, the body of the horse and rider are entwined, influencing new spheres of ability outside traditional interdependence frameworks. It provides a deep emotional connection in a world that can often be isolating and disempowering.
Attempts to frame para dressage riders as super cripples or inspirational have had limited success. By comparison, the interdependence between horse and rider demonstrates the power of para dressage for challenging negative dependence assumptions associated with disability. By focusing on para dressage interdependence, the media can potentially change narratives about disability. Para dressage rider Noella Angel states her horse is her “reason to get up; he makes me feel normal.” By priming audiences to focus on the interdependence between horse and rider, media can change existing social narratives of disability.
