Telethons: Spectacle, Disability, and the Business of Charity,Used

Telethons: Spectacle, Disability, and the Business of Charity,Used

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SKU: SONG0190262079
Brand: Oxford University Press
$39.49
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Movie stars, entertainers, gameshow hosts, jugglers, platespinners, gospel choirs, corporate executives posing with oversized checks, household namebrand products, smiling children in leg bracesall were fixtures of the phenomenon that defined American culture in the second half of the twentieth century: the telethon. Hundreds of millions watched these weekendlong variety shows that raised billions of dollars for disabilityrelated charities. Drawing on over two decades of indepth research, Telethons trenchantly explores the complexity underneath the campy spectacles. At its center are the disabled children, who, thanks to a particular kind of historicalcultural marginalization, turned out to be ideal tools for promoting corporate interests, privatized healthcare, and class status. Offering a public message about helping these unfortunate victims, telethons perpetuated a misleading image of people with disabilities as helpless, passive, apolitical members of American society. Paul K. Longmore's revelatory chronicle shows how these images in fact helped major corporations increase their bottom lines, while filling gaps in the strange publicprivate hybrid U.S. health insurance system. Only once disabled people pushed back in public protests did the broader implications for all Americans become clear.Mining insights from great thinkers such as Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, and Alexis de Tocqueville, along with contemporary cultural figures like Jerry Lewis, Ralph Nader, and several disability rights activists, Telethons offers a provocative meditation on big business, American government, popular culture, Cold War values, and 'activism' both narrowly and broadly defined. As highly popular entertainment, telethons schooled Americans about how to feel about their bodies, fitness, health, and appropriate ways to interact with people whose bodies did not fit norms determined by advertisers. The programs also taught them about when to weep and how to cure guilt through 'conspicuous contribution.' Longmore's astute observations about psychology, economics, and society reveal how writing off telethons as kitsch and irrelevant has enabled many individual attitudes, corporate practices, and government policies to go unquestioned. Ultimately, Telethons reveals the passion, humanity, resistance, and triumph that were not centerstage on these popular telecasts by offering insights into the U.S. disability movement past and present.

⚠️ WARNING (California Proposition 65):

This product may contain chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer, birth defects, or other reproductive harm.

For more information, please visit www.P65Warnings.ca.gov.

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