Aesthetic Health Research Articles

Activating Empathy Through Art in Cancer Communities.

The Aesthetics of Health (AOH) undergraduate visual art studies course at the University of Texas at Austin aimed to enhance art students' awareness of cancer's impact not only medically but also socially, emotionally, financially, and spiritually and to examine how this experience might impact students' artwork, capacity for empathy, and connection to audience. During the spring 2021 semester, the AOH course instructors employed assorted pedagogical methods, including art, illness narrative, and community engagement, in special sessions led by professors, community practice artists, and cancer experts, respectively, as well as oral storytelling by those with lived experience of cancer (ie, cancer patients, posttreatment survivors, and loved ones). For the course's final project, the 15 student-artists created self-selected media works combining health and activism and displayed them in public spaces, including online. Student-artists took the Toronto Empathy Questionnaire during the first and last weeks of the course and provided feedback. Two group interviews were also held with cancer storytellers following their participation. Student-artists' average score on the Toronto Empathy Questionnaire increased from 52.46 at pretest to 55.38 at posttest. Student-artists and storytelling participants also reported having positive experiences. The AOH course's social practice approach encouraged student-artists to realize new ideas and relationships and modestly increased their capacity for empathy. The AOH framework demonstrates promise for increasing empathy through the arts in other educational, clinical, and artistic institutions. Further research is needed with larger sample sizes to measure the impact of the course and to demonstrate its potential for addressing burnout and moral distress.

Rethinking illness through performance: The gaze and the aesthetics of health in Charles Burns' Black Hole

Abstract Focusing on the relation Charles Burns' Black Hole weaves between identity, illness, performance and desire, this article reads in Black Hole a celebration of perversion as its own epistemic structure as it simultaneously exposes the possibilities opened up by performance for a re-articulation of abnormality as a positive identity whose own idiosyncratic value can, in turn, become a site of investment for new individual and cultural forms of desire. Narrating the story of a group of American teenagers whose community is prey to a sexually transmitted disease, which visibly transforms the body of its host through the addition of extraordinary appendages, Black Hole opens up the experience of sickness to the notion of performance. Multiplying the set of responses available to the subject, it promotes an idiosyncratic understanding of illness as an identity while cultivating an understanding of the latter as the solidification of a specific mode of performance. Exploring the ways in which the two contrary practices of dissimulation and voluntary spectacularization embodied by Burns' protagonists signal new possible spaces of resistance to the visual dominance of the medical apparatus and its identificatory discourse, this article exposes how the willful appropriation of the sick identity and its correlative self-objectification force the re-articulation of the unidirectional relation set up by the gaze as a bidirectional mode of address in which both actors participate in the constitution of desire. Reading in Burns' portrayal of Eliza a positive and active embrace of monstrosity as its own form of identity and a disruption of the traditional relationship posited by the dominant discourse between active observer and passive patient, this article explores the potential implicit in performance to challenge the traditional hegemonic discourse of medicine and public health and to articulate a new approach to desire and sexuality for and around the contagious monster.

Group fitness instructors as local level health promoters: a Foucauldian analysis of the politics of health/fitness dynamic

ABSTRACTAs fitness professionals, group fitness instructors play an important role in promoting recommended public health initiatives to various communities. While their practices are connected to public health policy, their certifications are often provided by commercially operated agencies in the North American context. The interrelationship of commercial and governmental control creates a complex environment where certain ways of understanding health and the fit body become dominant. In this paper, consequently, we were interested in what fitness knowledges informed Canadian group fitness instructors’ practices. Approaching our topic from a Foucauldian perspective, we conducted semi-structured interviews with five instructors who had a provincially governed fitness qualification. The findings revealed that two knowledges – health as illness prevention and the aesthetics of health – strongly directed the instructors’ class design despite their willingness to think, particularly about health, differently. Their certification reinforced the medical, physiological, and psychological knowledges that tend to assign health as individual responsibility, but left the social issues behind the healthy, fit body unproblematized. From a Foucauldian perspective, these dominant knowledges locked the instructors within dual control of anatomo-political and bio-political neoliberal power relations. To assist the instructors to problematize the control mechanism behind the dominant knowledge structure, we call for inclusion of broader knowledge base in their certification training through which serving the multiple needs of their various clientele can be constructively negotiated.

Paradoxes of the Flesh

Analyzing women’s fitness/beauty magazines for advice on diet and exercise reveals a range of contradictions, the focus of this research. Contradictory diet and fitness discourses signify our culture’s paradoxical expectations for women’s bodies, ensuring that virtually no woman can measure up. In short, the production of feminine bodies is rigged for failure. Starting with Spitzack’s (1990) initial insights into the “aesthetics of health” and fat as disease, we explicate, through textual analysis, the underlying principles of eight essential contradictions in diet and fitness discourses (e.g., diets are freeing), principles that both necessitate and enable the discursive net in which contemporary women are ensnared. Comparisons are drawn between the themes that Spitzack elaborated and those uncovered by our examination 20 years later. Connections are made to the obesity “epidemic” and implications are discussed. Future research should investigate the actual interpretation and utilization of these contradictory messages among magazine readers.

Art Education and the Aesthetics of Health in the Age of AIDS

Five dominant metaphors are provided as aesthetic assumptions that influence visual representations of the body's illness and health. The surveyed, sanctified, simulated, surrogate, and commodified body serve as examples of how the body's illness and health are objectified and stereotyped through works of art. A sixth metaphor, the repositioned body, is proposed as a means by which to critique illness and health stereotypes and to promote compassionate and caring representations of the afflicted body. Art education is considered as vital to the awareness and understanding of visual images that impact the body's illness and health.

Art Education and the Aesthetics of Health in the Age of AIDS

Introduction In a recent radio address from the Oval Office, President Clinton (1995) informed the nation that out of moral obligation, he was going direct the Food and Drug Administration to propose stiff restrictions on the advertising, marketing, and sales of cigarettes Invoking a 14-month study by the FDA, his message was aimed at the way in which cigarettes are advertised manipulative visual images-seducing young people smoke in complete disregard for their health (Clinton, p. 1). Clinton's declaration testifies the importance of art education at a time in history when visual culture dominates the way in which values, attitudes and beliefs about the body's health and welfare are disseminated. Visual culture is all inclusive and is appropriate content for art education in a cultural democracy. It represents that have been traditionally excluded from the of great works, images produced for film or television, for example, are now capable of receiving the same careful consideration that was once lavished upon works that made up the canon (Bryson, Holly, & Moxey, 1994, p. xvi). Today, technology has progressed the point that a vast quantity of images and text are transmitted via the Internet, CD ROM, the World Wide Web, and other electronic delivery systems. The result: visual culture has increased exponentially. In the Age of AIDS, Ebola, and other diseases, mass media images of the body deluge the late 20th century post-industrial landscape. The Age of these diseases ironically parallels the Age of Information. Visually provocative, they instill fear and confusion on the hand, and the desire for glamour and survival on the other. The White House address clearly indicates the impact of visual culture on the human body and the body politic, what Mitchell (1994) refers as the pictorial turn (p. 9). The President responded with evangelical zeal the smoking crisis among young children. By censuring the corporate tobacco producers as evil-doers and sympathizing with young consumers as sacrificial lambs, he polarized the discourse on health. What the radio message ignores, however, are educational strategies for understanding the implications of health-related images. Art educators can contribute a curriculum reform that includes visual culture and its effect upon students' physical, emotional, and social well-being. Such programs would value students' ability interpret the ideological content of visual images that affect the health of both their human and cultural bodies (Mitchell, p. 16). Fear of disease invading the body, marginalization of those who are afflicted, the search for cures, taking political action, and terminality and deathrepresent some of the conditions from which visual metaphors about illness and health originate. What are the aesthetic assumptions that inform the production of visual metaphors regarding illness and health? How have the visual arts contributed historically the fear of illness and prejudice toward those who are afflicted? What impact can art education theory and practice have on health consciousness today? These and other questions will be the focus of this paper, the purpose of which will not be suggest the abolition of health stereotypes, but influence art educational practices that will make school children aware of the inherent patterns in visual images that represent illness and health. Illness Metaphors and Stereotypes Sontag (1978) dissuades the use of metaphors because they mystify illness; they usurp the power of the afflicted deal effectively with their affliction. Her first-hand experience with cancer convinced her that nothing is more punitive than give a disease a meaning-that meaning being invariably a moralistic one (p. 58). Ironically, illness and disease metaphors are semiotically contagious through a pathogenic process of signification (Feldman, 1990, p. …