Representing Age and Disability

Introduction

Age and disability are often the least discussed areas of representation, yet both involve powerful stereotypes and persistent inequalities. For AQA A-Level Media Studies, you need to understand representations of youth (drawing on Stanley Cohen's folk devils and moral panics), old age (from invisibility to "grey tsunami" narratives), and disability (drawing on Colin Barnes and the distinction between impairment and disability). You should also grasp debates around tokenism versus authentic representation.

Youth Representation

Stanley Cohen: Folk Devils and Moral Panics

Stanley Cohen's Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972) is a foundational text. Studying media coverage of Mods and Rockers clashes in 1960s Britain, Cohen argued that the media generate moral panics — episodes of disproportionate public concern about a perceived threat.

Key features of a moral panic:

• A condition, episode, person or group emerges as a threat to societal values.
• The media present this threat in stylised and stereotypical fashion.
• Moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians.
• Socially accredited experts pronounce diagnoses and solutions.
• Ways of coping are evolved or resorted to.
• The condition disappears or deteriorates.

Cohen calls the targets of moral panics "folk devils" — symbolic figures onto which social anxieties are projected. Young people have been perennial folk devils:

Era	Folk Devil	Moral Panic
1960s	Mods and Rockers	Seaside violence
1970s	Muggers (racialised)	Street crime (see Hall Policing the Crisis)
1980s	Football hooligans	Crowd violence
1990s	Ravers, ecstasy	Drug deaths
2000s	Hoodies, knife crime	Urban fear
2010s	"Snowflake" students	Culture wars
2020s	TikTok teens, gangs	Technology and violence panics

flowchart LR
    A[Social Anxiety] --> B[Media Amplification]
    B --> C[Stereotyped Coverage]
    C --> D[Political Response]
    D --> E[Folk Devil Constructed]
    E --> F[Policy and Policing]

Beyond Folk Devils

Not all youth representation is moral panic. Youth is also represented as:

• Aspirational and trendsetting — fashion, music, tech
• Vulnerable — victims of exploitation, mental health crises
• Wise and politically engaged — climate activists, Malala Yousafzai
• Comic — sitcom teenagers (The Inbetweeners)

Youth representation often depends on whose youth: middle-class white teens are more likely to be framed sympathetically than working-class Black teens — a pattern Hall and colleagues documented in Policing the Crisis (1978).

Age: Children

Representations of children range from:

• Innocent vulnerability — need of protection (news coverage of missing children)
• Precocious knowingness — child actors, talent shows
• Threat/monstrosity — occasional moral panic about "feral children"

The "innocence" framing is powerfully gendered and racialised: white female children are most readily framed as innocent; Black male children are often "adultified" in news coverage.

Representing Older People

Older people have historically been either invisible in media or subject to specific stereotypes:

• Wise grandparent — benign, helpful, peripheral
• Grumpy old person — Victor Meldrew (One Foot in the Grave)
• Vulnerable and frail — news coverage of care, scams
• Sexless — older people's romantic and sexual lives rarely represented
• "Grey tsunami" — demographic panic framing ageing as crisis

Jane Cumberbatch and Ageing Femininity

Older women face particular representational double binds:

• Expected to "age gracefully" but mocked if they do not hide signs of ageing
• Seen as either "invisible" or "trying too hard"
• Marginalised in advertising except for very specific products (anti-ageing, funeral plans)
• Actresses over 40 historically struggle to find leading roles (a pattern slowly shifting with The Crown, Big Little Lies)

Older men are often granted more representational space (e.g., "silver fox" tropes, continuing leading-man status) — an intersection of age and gender inequality.

Positive Shifts

Contemporary media include more nuanced older representations:

• Grace and Frankie (Netflix) — older women's friendship and sexuality
• The Great British Bake Off — older contestants as competent and charismatic
• Advertising increasingly includes older models (though often still conventionally attractive)

Traditional Older Stereotype	Contemporary Alternative
Wise grandparent	Active protagonist
Frail dependent	Competent professional
Grumpy/foolish	Complex antihero
Sexless	Romantically/sexually active

Disability Representation

Colin Barnes and the Social Model

Colin Barnes is a leading UK disability studies scholar. His work (including Disabling Imagery and the Media, 1992) argues that media representations of disability are overwhelmingly negative and reinforce disabling social structures.

Barnes and others distinguish between two models of disability: