Disability Dates as Microgenre: 1990s Sitcoms and Backlash to the Americans with Disabilities Act

Abstract

This article performs a historical corrective, documenting representations of disability in popular U.S. television sitcoms of the 1990s. While these shows did not center disability, they often featured strikingly similar episodic narratives involving disability, using the framework of romantic dates with a main character. This article analyzes these episodes as a microgenre, referred to as “disability dates.” This microgenre represents a fleeting subgenre of the sitcom that used similar strategies to represent disability and to reproduce popular discourses that opposed or undermined the Americans with Disabilities Act (1990).