The rise of disability aesthetics

Abstract

With the exponential growth of disability arts and culture, the term “disability aesthetics,” coined by Tobin Siebers, is finding widespread purchase in criticism and curation. But what that term means is both complex and not yet popularly understood. Disability aesthetics is subject, then, to a strange duality; it is both invisible and omnipresent, amorphous yet widely engaged. In this chapter, I review what we mean by disability aesthetics as a principle of visual art; we can also identify it at work in other diverse art forms including poetry, music, film, drama, dance, graphic medicine, literature, curation, and design. Yet many remain unfamiliar with the term. In this chapter, I seek to uncouple disability aesthetics from ableist misconceptions, and to instead define and explore its various generative meanings. I likewise suggest how might we deploy it to better understand – and intervene into – the representation of disability in visual art.