Analysis of Mockery and Discrimination towards People with Disabilities in Cartoons: The Family Guy Case

Abstract

Disability is a topic that arouses social interest and that has been approached and represented in different ways throughout history. Analysing media portrayals of disability is needed to ease the development of inclusive societies. This work aims to identify the social representations of people with disabilities and the cases of mockery and discrimination that appear in the well-known Family Guy cartoons. For this purpose, a mixed methodology has been chosen, extracting all possible cases of the concepts used to refer to disability. The results show that the most commonly used concepts are pejorative and typical of dispensational and medical-rehabilitative paradigms. Regarding mockery and discrimination, it is observed that when both are related to a direct interaction with people with a disability, they appear in a much higher percentage. Although Family Guy is not an educational series and is aimed at audiences over 16 years of age, the results of this work promote media education as a tool to critically analyse the representations offered by the media to promote an inclusive society.