(Where) Are Disabled Girls in Virtual Space? Representation of disability and gender in Google Images
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.25071/1918-6215.34900Abstract
In this paper I explore virtual space as a specific location in which representation and meaning-making take place. Virtual space is a space in which modern girls spend much of their time. It is the space in which social interactions, identity formations and re/presentation occur for many girls. This space is portable, changeable, and is touted as accessible to those with impairments (although this assertion is not uncontested, Ellis & Kent, 2011); as such it is valuable to examine if and how disabled girls are represented within this space. Virtual space is vast and in order to narrow the scope of this paper, I used the search engine Google Images to pull from virtual space a selection of images that I interrogated using a mixed methods approach to ask: Are disabled girls present in virtual space? If so, where are they in that space and how are they represented there?
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Authors retain copyright over their work and license their work for publication in Critical Disabilities Discourses under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivaties 4.0 International License (CC BY-ND 4.0). This means that the work is available for commercial and non-commercial use and reproduction provided that the original authors are credited and the original publication in this journal is cited, following standard academic practice.
