Based on analysis of the ADA and the discourse surrounding it, as well as interviews with leaders of organizations serving deaf and hearing-impaired persons, this paper explores the definitions of the deaf and their rights implicit in this law. It suggests that the law addresses deafness as an inability and the rights of the deaf in terms of their integration into mainstream American society. These definitions, however, are problematic for some deaf leaders who argue that the deaf community is a cultural and linguistic minority and that policies of integration can be threatening to this subculture. Using narrative analysis, semiotics, and historical comparison, mental retardation is at times tragedy, a burden, or a dimension that helps to understand the essentials in life.
Rehabilitation is radical exclusion, a phantasy, truth, interconnection.
In this paper, I place this topic in the existing literature on media and disability. I term the overriding rhetoric reflected in the popular magazine articles as, by and large, a rhetoric of gendered incompetence. Findings indicate that editors from more pluralistic communities place higher value on news about ethnic and other minorities, and a lower value on stories about Americans with Disabilities. Local newspapers appear to be more responsive to the majority groups' interests than those of the excluded groups. This paper examines several turning points in the past, which had significant impacts on people with disabilities in the media.