“My Leg is a Giant Stiletto Heel”: Fashioning the ProsthetisedBody

Abstract

Fashion and prosthetics may appear at first glance to be unlikely bedfellows. Yet a tiny number of pioneering fashion scholars have begun to extend the concept of adornment beyond recognized forms of dress and examine items that were hitherto perceived as belonging to the medical domain. This article embraces a similar outlook and expands upon the currently available research. It considers how the amputee body is incorporated into the visual mainstream through the use of new generation “fashionable” prostheses, and how—and if—such prostheses can help to disrupt dominant discourses of normalcy. To do this, we study visual representations of three amputee artists and public figures: British performer Viktoria Modesta; American athlete, model, and speaker Aimee Mullins; and Japanese artist Mari Katayama. We argue that the use of aesthetic prostheses de-medicalizes disabled bodies and instead constructs them as consumer bodies, granting them what disability scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson calls “the freedom to be appropriated by consumer culture” and “integrating a previously excluded group into the dominant order”. We then turn to the few images of disability that subvert such order, by engaging with prostheses creatively or by rejecting them altogether and celebrating unadorned stumps.