La rappresentazione commerciale della disabilità. Il caso Bebe Vio

Many researches have indicated that media representations of people with disabilities are often biased by underrepresentation, clichés, stereotypes and stigmatization. The way in which media present disabled athletes seems to convey the same biases. Bebe Vio is a Paralympic champion who has become famous in Italy so much as to become the testimonial of important TV commercials. The author analyse six of these commercial with a qualitative content analysis. The corpus shows as the commercial representation of Vio, always posed in “active” and “individualistic” way, is focused on the concealment of disability. The spectacularization of impairment and prostheses highlights how “mental strength” and the “magic value of technology” lead to a narrative overcoming of the disadvantage. In this way the stereotype, removed from the images, re-emerges implicitly as a basic element of the commercial message.