Disability Aesthetics Research Articles

Disability Arts and Disability Aesthetics

Disability aesthetics has emerged in the modern/contemporary era as a critical approach that challenges traditional notions of beauty, wholeness, and normalcy in art. By centering the experiences and perspectives of disabled individuals, disability aesthetics seeks to subvert ableist assumptions and stereotypes, presenting disability as a natural part of human diversity. This paper aims to explore how disability aesthetics challenges ableism, expands our understanding of art and beauty, and brings about societal changes through a critical analysis of various examples of disability arts in the modern/contemporary era. However, this paper also acknowledges the potential pitfalls within the field of disability aesthetics. These include the risk of fetishization or exoticization of disability, and the need for a more intersectional analysis that considers how disability intersects with other marginalized identities. As disability aesthetics continues to evolve, it is crucial to address these challenges and work towards a more nuanced and inclusive understanding of disability representation in art. Given this, by critically examining both the strengths and limitations of disability aesthetics, this paper aims to contribute to the ongoing dialogue about representation, identity, and artistic expression in the context of disability. Ultimately, it underscores the importance of continual reflection and refinement within the field to ensure that disability aesthetics remains a powerful tool for social change and artistic innovation.

Coloring Outside the Lines: Teaching Graphic Medicine as Disability Studies

The article argues for the importance of teaching undergraduate graphic medicine courses informed by disability studies. Using her experiences teaching graphic medicine classes over the last eight years, the author argues for the importance of graphic medicine courses beyond medical school curricula. This creates an opportunity not just to introduce disability studies concepts to undergraduates, but also for disability studies and graphic medicine to meaningfully illuminate each other. The article argues that framing comics through disability aesthetics and disability activism (including precepts such as access intimacy and disability justice) reveals how powerfully and consistently graphic medicine centers each. In turn, graphic medicine provides powerful opportunities to reimagine disability representation and access as aesthetics and accommodation. The article shares experiences of teaching graphic medicine, reflects on related dilemmas, and offers fruitful strategies for anyone wishing to teach graphic medicine courses informed by a disability studies approach.

Helen Keller’s ‘Sense of light’: life-writing, light-writing and the photosynthetic subject

ABSTRACT Contributors to Mere Light ask how ‘light’ falls in and through the non-visual medium of the literary text, illuminating that medium’s potential to initiate an experience of immediacy. While we might look to the luminous inscriptions of medieval mystics for its template, a fascinating post-Enlightenment exemplar of this paradox is the literary ‘self-recording’ of the deafblind modern ‘miracle’ Helen Keller. ‘Illustrated’ with often surreal photographs that both marked their modernity and complemented their thematic preoccupation with the dynamics of light, Keller’s nine autobiographies strove to replicate her primarily ‘tactual’ sense experience in graphic language while tendering apparently eyewitness images of light. Where these literary dissimulations bring the body of Keller’s disabled I into view, they develop a complex ‘sense of light’ as vibrant, self-actualising literary metaphor, capable of moving between sight and touch, and thus beyond the limits of both. Projecting its speaking I as light’s writing alongside illustrative photographs that projected that I as light-written, Keller’s life-writing synthesises sight and touch. Epitomised in her experimental The World I Live In (1908), this was to ‘photo’ synthesise the mimetic pretenses of post-Enlightenment visualising technologies with a transhistorical disability aesthetics oriented around peripheral – hence invisible – embodiment.

Merleau-Ponty's Cézanne as Misfit Artist

This paper explores Cézanne’s art through the lens of disability gain. Disability gain defies the ability-disability binary, which defines disability as a lack of ability, by emphasizing what is gained through different disabilities. Central to my discussion are (1) Tobin Siebers’s description of modern art as vitally and thematically disabled and (2) Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s concept of misfitting, which allows for a phenomenological account of disability that emphasizes the depth of awareness and creative world-making possibilities that are gained through disability. By bringing Siebers’s approach to disability aesthetics and Garland-Thomson’s concept of misfitting into conversation with Merleau-Ponty’s “Cézanne’s Doubt” and “Eye and Mind,” I will explain how Cézanne’s unique way of perceiving the world and capturing it in paint helps Merleau-Ponty to dismantle abstract, disembodied concepts of visual perception and trace the nuanced contours of lived perspective. In other words, what is gained through Cézanne’s disabilities is a revolutionary optics that overcomes the limitations of Cartesian optics.

Cripping instagram: Embodied, Critical, and Creative Cultures of Use

ABSTRACT: How do disabled and chronically ill artists and curators navigate corporate-owned social media platforms as self-authored disabled subjects and communities? Mobilizing concepts from crip theory and accessible curation together with discourse and visual analysis, and engaging with artists’ and curators’ views about social media platforms and selfie culture via interviews, this paper develops a conceptual framework that prioritizes the intertwining of emergence, endurance, and exhaustion in crip artistic and curatorial online practices. The potential for a radical social media disability aesthetics takes shape as a powerful but contingent and troubled matter of digital crip emergence/emergency, a mode of contending with social media’s demands and violences through embodied automedial practices that foster presence, community, and creativity and contest the terms of social media visibility. This article activates this model by analyzing collaboratively authored Instagram accounts that feature residencies.

Disability aesthetics in Belgian arts and disability practices: a qualitative study from the perspective of the non-disabled, facilitating performing artists

ABSTRACT The presence of non-disabled artists challenges the possibility of disability aesthetics in arts and disability projects. This study therefore examines the meaning of disability for the aesthetics of their collaborations and artistic practice through in-depth interviews with twelve Belgian non-disabled performing artists. The findings show that the collaborations often confirm their artistic practice in which the ‘able-bodied’ notion is no longer of their interest. Yet beliefs are also observed that can reinforce ableist ideas and the aesthetic appropriation of disability. Disability aesthetics in arts and disability can only develop fully when structural barriers to disabled performers in the mainstream are removed.

"You Know Who I Am? I'm Mr. John Paul's Boy"

Inspired by the work of Saidiya Hartman, Stephen Best, and others who ask us to account for the absences in the archive, this essay looks to Eudora Welty's photograph, "A village pet, Mr. John Paul's Boy/Rodney, ca. 1940," for clues to animate his life and the lives of others with intellectual disabilities who lived in Mississippi during the Great Depression. It argues that Welty employed what Tobin Siebers characterized as an "aesthetics of disability," to challenge traditional politics, upend expectations of age, race, gender, and ability, and provide insight into the "amazing worlds" of people with cognitive impairments.

정치적인 몸 연구로서 장애미학과 신체 탐구로서의 장애예술 연구

Disability art was analyzed as providing an opportunity to understand the various sensory capacities of the body, and based on this, the body of the disabled, which reveals the politics of symbolic distribution of bodies, was analyzed as a political and aesthetic body as a new division of the sensory system. Furthermore, the aesthetics of disability was discussed through the analysis of disability art, in which the boundaries of the sensible are broken, the possible and the impossible are constantly rearranged, and the value system of objects is re-divided. For a concrete and empirical analysis of the aesthetics of disability research, the works and works of two artists were explored, and the understanding of the body of the disabled as a political body revealing the re-division of the sensory system was analyzed. We analyzed the frame concept of artist Hwan Kim, which reveals the dividing line of the sensory system by revealing the intersection of the gaze of the subject and the gaze of the other, and understood the work of artist Hyunwoo Kim, which was manifested as a cognitive, sensory, and artistic medium.

Toward Environment Theory: Social Aspects of Affordances

The article explores the connection between the social aspects of affordances and the normativity of environmental perception, referring to the theory of embodied cognition, ecological theory of perception, experimental design, information theory, situated aesthetics and disability aesthetics. The authors argue that distinguishing an affordance from the environmental background does not necessarily depend on recognition and may be associated with the perception of difference (which is facilitated by environmental variability). The main question about how the perception of non-normative affordances is possible leads the authors to the conclusion that the basis of such perception may be non-normative bodily experience (or its possibility), the carriers of which, in particular, are people with experience of disability. It is assumed that the condition for perceiving non-normative affordances in the environment is empathy towards the other who has different affordances, and this empathic access is captured by the concept of “third experience”. Illustrated by a number of examples from disability aesthetics, the concept of “third experience” acts as a guide for noticing and designing environments in which difference can be embodied without the risk of slipping into homogeneity on the one hand or diversity on the other.

Affective Realities and Conceptual Contradictions of Patricia Piccinini’s Art: Ecofeminist and Disability Studies Perspectives

The recent exhibition of Patricia Piccinini’s art called That’s Us (Toruń, CSW) largely represents the Australian artist’s visions and fascinations known from earlier exhibitions. Questioning and erasing the borders between species, the affective realities of Piccinini’s art are bound to the concepts of care, empathy and fragility, which refigure what is human and non-human and the relations between them by expanding the notion of mothering and fostering to include interspecies relations. Beginning with a discussion of the uncanny, abjection and monstrosity, this article aims to examine the complicated implications of interpreting Piccinini’s art within the conceptual framework of ecofeminism, as well as in the context of disability aesthetics. In her explorations of different and alternative corporealities, Piccinini, among many other things, asks questions about ideologies of normativity and able-bodiedness, suggesting the possibility of going beyond them.

Narrative Bonds: Multiple Narrators in the Victorian Novel

Narrative Bonds: Multiple Narrators in the Victorian Novel

Corporeality in Contemporary Iraqi Fiction

The aesthetics of corporeality in post-2003 Iraqi fiction shows a development in perceiving the body both artistically and as a cultural sign. Corporeality is envisioned here on two levels: the first entails corporeality of the text as a dialectic space for the embodiment of corporeal experience. The second, involves the representation of the body as a technique to redefine and question corporeal and sexual identities. This article suggests that this new perception of corporeality indicates a new gaze towards the body in contemporary Iraqi fiction, manifested in: first, the dialectic relation between fragmented narration and fragmented corporeality as an embodiment of annihilation in a post-invasion and war context; second, the aesthetics of illness and disability as a mechanism to question normative bodies and to voice subaltern corporeality; finally, corporeal gender politics which build a novel perception of sexuality.

Disability Gain, Aesthetics, and Inclusion: What does it mean to experience disability in early modern England?

Disability Gain, Aesthetics, and Inclusion: What does it mean to experience disability in early modern England?

Doing Disability Movies Differently

The article reflects on one author’s participation in a project that explored the aesthetics of disability through the production of an accessible, open-access film about disability representation. It evaluates the potential for accessible creative texts produced by disabled media makers to serve as sites of critical, creative intervention. Written by the filmmaker (Muredda) and three researchers (Jones, Zbitnew, and Collins), this reflection draws from the principles of critical accessibility, as well as from scholarship on disability and aesthetics, to examine the intersection of disabled film criticism and textual production. It considers both the potential and the limitations of accessible productions about representation as a rejoinder to a representational tradition that has often implemented the figurative language of disability in functional and regressive ways, largely without input from disabled artists and spectators.

Cultural safety as a foundation for allyship in disability arts

The practice of allies – the non-disabled producers, directors, curators and facilitators who support the work of disabled arts and media makers – has not been subject to dedicated analysis. In this article, we argue that cultural safety, respect, and trust is a precursor to good allyship in the creative industries. We outline factors that influence feelings of safety or non-safety for disabled arts and media makers, and the way the legacy of the medical model makes it difficult for many arts and media workers to appreciate and enact enablers of safety as part of an allyship relationship. Education through reports and training sessions is not enough to ensure would be arts allies can establish cultural safety. What is required, we argue, is direct experience of how disabled artists and long-term allies enact cultural safety through the disability space, time and relational concepts central to disability arts, culture, and aesthetics. POINTS OF INTEREST There has been little research on the work of allies in art and media industries Arts allies are defined as the non-disabled policy makers, producers, directors, and facilitators who support the work of disabled arts and media makers Arts allies often focus on logistics, infrastructure, and systems (e.g. adding ramps, hearing loops, interpreters, or other adaptations) to make arts and media projects/workplaces more accessible to disabled artists Allies must also consider cultural safety as part of their support of arts and media projects/workplaces. Cultural safety recognises that disabled people have a shared identity, community, and culture, based on a shared history of oppression, shared lived experience, and shared language to describe that experience, and projects/workplaces that do not respect this are alienating Reading reports, attending events, and participating in conversations is not enough to establish knowledge of disability identity, community, and culture We consider how would-be allies can acquire the exposure to disability culture in action required to create cultural safety, respect, and trust in their allyship relationships with disabled arts and media makers

No Stairs in the Bush? Disability and Australian Steampunk

Abstract: With a combination of fantastical and anachronistic technologies and neo-Victorian settings, steampunk emerged from a niche genre to a widespread phenomenon. But this, in turn, raised urgent questions about the "punk"-ness of steampunk and the extent to which it can critique, avoid, and repurpose the Victorian trappings that it adopts. This article examines one such query: whether steampunk can interrogate its ableist underpinnings and, particularly, whether Australian steampunk writers do so in a way that is distinctly Australian. Beginning with a brief overview of Australian steampunk and the genre's conflicted approach to disability aesthetics and roleplaying, the author examines three case studies: the invisibility of disability in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century proto-steampunk stories, prosthetics as a vehicle for imperial trauma, and the recurrent motif of the clockwork heart. As Australian steampunk exists outside the genre's mainstream, so too is it able to speak to the marginal elements, such as underlying ableism, that the mainstream too often ignores.

Reflections on Crip Imitations as Cultural Space-Making

The article reflects on the complexities of deploying imitation as a performance theme within disability arts. The authors are animated by disability arts curator Amanda Cachia’s 2019 exhibition, Automatisme Ambulatoire: Hysteria, Imitation, and Performance, which showcased disabled and nondisabled artists exploring the cultural dynamics of imitation through the performing arts. The article begins by considering how imitation enacts proximal familiarity with difference by discussing disability simulation activities, actor training systems, and forms of cultural appropriation. A disability studies framework is employed to consider how artists engage imitation as an element of disability aesthetics. The analysis is developed in conversation with four examples of disability performance—Helen Dowling’s Breaker, Claire Cunningham’s tributary, Sins Invalid’s performance An Unshamed Claim to Beauty, and Jess Thom’s rendition of Samuel Beckett’s Not I. The article posits that by enacting imitation as a performance theme, disabled artists resist notions that imitation is reserved for bodies read as “neutral,” and attend to how imitation brings disability artists into a complex dynamic of political relationality.

Access intimacy and disability aesthetics in I Wanna Be With You Everywhere

This review examines the aesthetic, social, and political force of access intimacy as it emerges in three performances that took place during the 2019 multidisciplinary festival of disability performance, I Wanna Be With You Everywhere. By examining the access aesthetics present in Kayla Hamilton's Nearly Sighted/unearthting the dark, Jerron Herman's Relative, and performances of Protactile poetry by John Lee Clark and company, I argue that these performances investigate the ways in which access aesthetics fosters access intimacy by creating ways to dwell in disability without centering disability-as-identity.

From the Editor

Previous articleNext article FreeFrom the EditorCharles W. MahoneyCharles W. Mahoney Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe 2021 review issue of The Wordsworth Circle includes appraisals of 27 books under consideration for the Marilyn Gaull Book Award, which the Wordsworth-Coleridge Association created this year in honor of the founding editor of the journal, to recognize “the most outstanding monograph, biography, or scholarly edition reviewed during the previous year in The Wordsworth Circle.” The charge to the review committee is to determine “the book that best represents the spirit of wide-ranging inquiry, critical acumen, and enduring influence on the field that Marilyn Gaull always championed.” The recipient of this inaugural award will be recognized at the annual lunch of the Wordsworth-Coleridge Association at the January 2022 meeting of the Modern Language Association in Washington, DC. Also in honor of its founding editor, The Wordsworth Circle will publish a special issue in 2022 in celebration of Marilyn Gaull’s life and career (vol. 53, no. 1).Among the books under review this year are two biographies of Wordsworth that were published in 2020, the 250th anniversary of the poet’s birth: a significantly revised, second edition of Stephen Gill’s William Wordsworth: A Life (first edition 1989) and Jonathan Bate’s Radical Wordsworth: The Poet Who Changed the World. Additional books under review that concentrate on Wordsworth include Wordsworth’s Unremembered Pleasure (Alexander Freer), The Wordsworth-Coleridge Circle and the Aesthetics of Disability (Emily Stanback), and William Wordsworth and Modern Travel: Railways, Motorcars and the Lake District, 1830–1940 (Saeko Yoshikawa).There is an exciting constellation of studies of Romantic print and media culture in The Connected Condition: Romanticism and the Dream of Communication (Yohei Igarashi), Literary Manuscript Culture in Romantic Britain (Michelle Levy), Album Verses and Romantic Literary Culture: Poetry, Manuscript, Print, 1780–1850 (Samantha Matthews), and Book Traces: Nineteenth-Century Readers and the Future of the Library (Andrew Stauffer). There is also welcome attention to comparative aspects of Romanticism in The Italian Idea (Will Bowers), Henry Crabb Robinson: Romantic Comparatist, 1790–1811 (Philipp Hunnekuhl), and European Literatures in Britain, 1815–1832 (Diego Saglia).In addition to the Wordsworth-Coleridge Association lunch at the 2022 meeting of the MLA, the Association is sponsoring two scholarly sessions, “Romanticism and Data” and “Romantic Epistemologies,” from which a selection of the proceedings will appear in The Wordsworth Circle, vol. 53, no. 3 (2022). Looking ahead to the 2023 meeting of the MLA, the Association will be sponsoring a session on “Romanticism and Sexuality”; the call for papers appears above. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 52, Number 4Fall 2021 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/716677 Views: 153 © 2021 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

To Free Speech from Free Speech

Liberalism glorifies free speech as the primary means to achieve progress. Free speech is presumed to involve a clear association across awareness, individual voice, collective speaking, and increased representation. Michel Foucault located a genealogy of related practices of speaking truth in the Stoic tradition of parrhesia. However, as he established, liberalism limits speech, as centrism and civility flatten all forms of speech as equivalent whereby all sides come to matter. As demonstrated today, the alt-right and radical left are seen as equally illiberal and asking for too much. Speech, specifically under liberalism, loses its import. The article asks what happens when we free the concept of speech from free speech and the liberal tradition. To explore this, the article turns to disability, particularly deafness, to grapple with other formulations of speech. It examines Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s classic film A City of Sadness (1989) and focuses on its representations of deafness and its disability aesthetics. Hou’s aesthetics and use of media objects establish a political critique that does not rely on truth, repair, or recognition. This film develops a Marxist theory of speech and reconsiders speech through other modes of governance like autocracy. Ultimately, the article explores how different governance structures rework not only speech but also notions of political change.