Combining media studies and archival research, this book critically examines historic and contemporary examples of media representations of queerness and disability – often intersecting – to establish and demonstrate a theory of “discriminatory convenience.”

Although social oppression is typically framed in terms of prejudice, hate, and other forms of dislike, D. Travers Scott argues for another perspective – inconvenience – by drawing upon histories of industrialization, technology, and modernist ideals of efficiency. Focusing on disabled persons and queer persons, but also examining non-Christians and the aged, some people are not always hated, they simply get in the way. From Appalachian folk songs to Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Convenient Discrimination uses historic and contemporary media representations to demonstrate and articulate cultural politics of discriminatory convenience. Scott analyzes and compares historical and contemporary discourses around health, media, technology, and social movements to present a combination of compelling case studies, bolstered by their autoethnographic accounts as a queer, formerly disabled activist-scholar.

Ultimately, drawing upon histories of industrialization and technology, and cultural ideologies of efficiency, this book argues for the utility of inconvenience as an analytic.