Dissertation Defense: Jessica Benham

In this dissertation, I analyze media representations of disability rights protests, specifically the 1987 Deaf President Now protests, the 1990 ‘crawl up’ protest, and the 2017 American Health Care Act protests. I argue that disabled protestors strategically staged protests to draw the attention of mass media and that photography of disabled people offers the opportunity to explore the relationships between word and image, sight and sound. I engage with scholarship from argument studies, social movement theory, classical rhetoric, childhood studies, disability studies, queer theory, and media studies. I primarily approach images through a critical discourse analysis.