Feminism, Disability, and Embodiment

Abstract

A recent exhibit on Feminism and Art at the National Museum of Women in the Arts included Barbara Bloom's 1995 work, Playboy in Braille. 1 For reasons that remain unknown to me, the museum chose to exhibit Bloom's work closed, leaving visitors to wonder about the relationship between a copy of a braille Playboy magazine and an exhibit on Feminism and Art. After all, Barbara Bloom did not create the braille edition of the magazine, so why would it be exhibited in an enclosed glass case crediting Barbara Bloom? After further investigation, I learned that Bloom's artistic addition to the magazine was the centerfold, a copy of Eve Arnold's 1954 photograph of Marilyn Monroe, fully clothed and reading James Joyce's Ulysses ([1922] 1992). 2 While perhaps not a conscious interrogation of the complex connections between feminism and disability studies, Barbara Bloom's Playboy in Braille nonetheless provides rich interpretive ground for considering how feminist disability studies draws upon and challenges analyses of bodily norms, identity, accommodation, representation, and oppression in both feminism and disability studies, themes addressed by the essays included in this volume.