Disability Aesthetics Research Articles

Blind Visuality in Bruce Horak’s "Through a Tired Eye"

This article proposes the concept of blind visuality as a response to the injunction to look differently at both visual images, and vision itself, posed by Bruce Horak’s exhibition Through a Tired Eye. The brightly colored impressionistic paintings suggest an artist who revels in the domain of the visual, yet he describes his practice as a representation of blindness. This accessible exposition of blind visuality speaks to the broad question of what critical disability arts contribute to discourses about vision, visuality and spectatorship in the arts. I analyze Horak’s paintings as examples of blind epistemology and haptic visuality, showing that this work evokes a way of seeing that blurs the boundaries between vision and embodied feeling. I argue that by expanding understandings of vision and multi-sensory knowledge, deconstructing the separation between vision and haptic perception, and challenging western ocularcentricism, blind visuality poses an alternative economy of looking that reflects disability aesthetics, shifts from individualism to relationality, and challenges understandings of perception/knowledge as a form of mastery.

The Wordsworth-Coleridge Circle and the Aesthetics of Disability by Emily B. Stanback

Reviewed by: The Wordsworth-Coleridge Circle and the Aesthetics of Disability by Emily B. Stanback Jared S. Richman (bio) Emily B. Stanback. The Wordsworth-Coleridge Circle and the Aesthetics of Disability. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Pp. v + 337. $84.99 hardcover. Disability studies scholars have for decades challenged the stability and efficacy of normalcy as a cultural and biological category. Now, the first full monograph with specific critical focus on Romanticism and disability, [End Page 116] Emily B. Stanback's The Wordsworth-Coleridge Circle and the Aesthetics of Disability, makes its remarkable debut. Her study locates disability as a crucial conceptual framework for subjective experience through Romantic writers' meditations on their own disabilities and those of others. The book centers on the Wordsworth-Coleridge coterie: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and Charles Lamb, but also John Thelwall, Thomas Beddoes, Humphry Davy, and Thomas Wedgewood with attention given to Robert Southey, Dorothy Wordsworth, Mary Lamb, Thomas Poole, William Godwin, Erasmus Darwin, and Sara Coleridge. The study embraces a valuable interdisciplinary approach by ranging across genre and form to engage short fiction, letters, journals, poetry, medical treatises, print satire, and memoir. Stanback convincingly demonstrates how aesthetic concerns related to and shaped by disability make their way into a wide range of cultural productions both public and private. Ultimately the book shows how works by writers like Wordsworth and Coleridge revealed a consciousness of disability that was culturally constructed during an era of rapid social change. The book's introduction operates in part as a cultural history of Romantic medicine, tracing its professionalization between 1790 and 1810 alongside the simultaneous growth of Romantic writing. Throughout, Stanback's delineation of disability demonstrates how norms related to health and illness had yet to be established at the turn of the nineteenth century. Deeply interested in the conditions of literary production, Stanback shows us how encounters with non-normative embodiment demanded, generated, and shaped new forms of expression, thus revealing the essential aesthetic value of disability within Romantic discourse. "The story I wish to tell," she explains, "is one of the productively diverse field of Romantic medicine and its relation to a correspondingly broad range of cultural attitudes towards those thought to be under the purview of medical authority—those who, by virtue of their non-normative bodies and minds, we might now call 'disabled'" (2). Stanback takes "disability" to be a sociocultural category with a foundation in medical structures, but one grounded in subjective experience. Aesthetic questions take center stage here and put Stanback's work in dialogue with important disability theorists such as Ato Quayson and Tobin Siebers. Moreover, she convincingly demonstrates how "Romantic disability aesthetics" is an essentially interdisciplinary mode, a claim borne out by an impressively detailed and rigorous textual analysis that testifies to the porousness and multimodality of Romantic discourse (3). Moving from humoral theory to Enlightenment conceptions of deformity through the early years of Georgian medicine, Stanback shows how the practice "for naming, describing, and studying diseases … [participated] in the cultural project of establishing embodied norms, and specifically to help [End Page 117] construct ideals of 'health'" (14–15). She ably negotiates a variety of social and political categories here, from gender construction to race theory to ethnography, from colonialism and empire to pathology and physiognomy. One of the great strengths of Stanback's approach is her emphasis on mental and psychological difference alongside the physical and the sensual. Such attention to the mind and brain allow her to explore senses of wonder, the sublime, and even disgust as Romantic writers encounter and experience the non-normative. Yet even while foregrounding "affective response," Stanback does so in order to "emphasize the role of corporeality in Romantic aesthetics" (45). The second chapter begins with the poet and elocutionist John Thelwall, whose background in medicine shaped his exposition on vocal disability, the Letter to Henry Cline (1810). Stanback identifies Thelwall's elocutionary practice as deeply democratic, and in her reading of his self-help ethos, she connects him to the physician Thomas Beddoes, whose novella, The History of Isaac Jenkins (1792), delineates principles of preventative care and frames the legacy of popular medicine, amateurism, and the rise of the medical professional. Here...

Silent Eloquence: Literary Extracts, the Aesthetics of Disability, and Melville’s “Fragments”

Herman Melville’s first published story, “Fragments from a Writing Desk” (1839; released in two parts in the Democratic Press, and Lansingburgh Advertiser), reimagines nineteenth-century American narratives of disabled female figures. In the first installment, Melville’s amorous narrator, L.A.V., quotes extensively from British romantic books of beauty, anthologies that gathered the best works from famous authors. In the second, Melville critiques L.A.V.’s exuberant citations, cultivating an alternative aesthetic we term “silent eloquence.” This essay argues that Melville’s early diptych reimagines deformed texts and disabled bodies by means of a deaf woman called “Inamorata.” Inspired by emergent deaf American communities, institutions, and forms of expression, and literary works by an array of deaf and hearing writers from James Nack and John R. Burnet to Washington Irving and Sarah Josepha Hale, Melville’s first fiction presents an early account of the communicative power of difference. Inamorata’s various, artful modes of expression— handwriting, signing, gestures, and expressions—put literary beauties and disabled bodies in conversation. Presenting nineteenth-century American readers with a new aesthetic vocabulary, “Fragments” simultaneously anticipates aspects of Melville’s major works and develops a concept of beauty capable of encompassing multiple senses, modes of address, experiences, and ways of knowing.

Alice the Excrescence: Disability Aesthetics and Sympathetic Form in The Diary of Alice James

This essay focuses on the subject of disability in The Diary of Alice James. While multiple critics have discussed James's invalidism, this essay is the first to suggest that James conceives of disability in relation to her aesthetics. I argue that James represents sympathetic discord by thematizing "excrescence," a term she initially uses to disparage a child with a disability but then repurposes to describe her own experiences. By analyzing her imaginative rendering of excrescence, I argue that James's views on disability enable her to craft a unique model of sympathetic form, one worthy of further study in Jamesian scholarship.

Something Deficient and Great: Disability Aesthetics and Narrative Prosthesis in Willa Cather’s My Ántonia

This essay emphasizes the relevance of disability in Willa Cather’s My Ántonia. I argue that Jim Burden’s responses to three disabled characters are not prejudiced but rather represent his education in an aesthetics that appreciates disability—an education that he simultaneously absorbs and resists. Discussing disability aesthetics and narrative prosthesis, this essay argues that disability in Cather’s early writing ranges from being a simple prosthetic sign of narrative differentiation to a complex and sympathetic resistance against an aesthetics of wholeness that results in exploitation and prejudice.

Archival Artistry: Exploring Disability Aesthetics in Late Twentieth Century Higher Education


 
 
 Jay Dolmage’s (2014) Disability Rhetoric encourages scholars to search beyond normative Aristolean bounds of rhetoric and embrace a critical lens of rhetorical activity as embodied, and disability as an inalienable aspect of said embodiment (p. 289). To that end, this project posits an innovative structure for rhetorically (re)analyzing disability history in higher education through a framework of disability aesthetics. In Academic Ableism, Jay Dolmage (2017) argues that an institution’s aesthetic ideologies and architecture denote a rhetorical agenda of ableism. In Disability Aesthetics, Tobin Siebers (2010) asserts disability is a vital aspect of aesthetic interpretation. Both works determine that disability has always held a crucial, critical role in the production and consumption of aestheticism, as it invites able-bodied individuals to consider the dynamic, nonnormative instantiations of the human body as a social, civic issue (p. 2). Disability, therefore, has the power to reinvigorate the sociorhetorical impact of both aesthetic representation and the human experience writ large. With this framework in mind, this project arranges an archival historiography of disability history in higher education in the late twentieth century at a mid-sized U.S. state institution. During this time, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act was finally signed into law, and universities confronted a legal demand to allow all students access. Ultimately, this project seeks to demonstrate how disability scholars and historiographers can widen the view of both disability history and disability rhetoric in higher education through a focus on student aesthetic performance and intervention.
 
 

Overcoming and Denial: Disability and Modern Dance in the United States

Dancers and choreographers have always been navigating disability within an ableist representational form. This article questions the ableist histories of modern dance in the United States and seeks to redefine how disability is conceived of within the field of dance. The article explores five themes found within archival research, including overcoming narratives, symbiotic and inseparability of dance and disability, denial of disability, changing choreographic practices, and disability aesthetics. Examples of these themes are found in primary source documents about and by Martha Graham, Ted Shawn, and Doris Humphrey and contextualized throughout the article with dance and disability studies theorization.

O’Reilly’s In Water I’m Weightless: Forming a Community through Monologues of Multiple Bodies

This essay discusses Kaite O’Reilly’s disability aesthetics, concentrating on her monologue, In Water I’m Weightless, which is a result of her endeavors to find new theatre languages and alternative dramaturgies that can redress mainstream representations of disability. What she terms ‘d’ monologues consist of a series of first-person narratives which present multiple bodies and languages voicing the lived experiences of people with various disabilities. The play frequently involves directly addressing the audience and alternating between oral and “visual” languages, in order to upbraid non-disabled people’s prejudices as well as encourage differently-abled spectators to embrace their identities. As such, O’Reilly’s play allows the spectators to see things anew, and, more significantly, to form a sense of community in the process. This is not a homogeneous community, however, because of the “fear” of disability among the spectators, with narrators overtly differentiating “they” and “we.” The play, therefore, calls for a new community of spectators of differing bodily abilities, for the stage is where a community, albeit one yet to come, can be imagined.

Review of Cognitive Disability Aesthetics: Visual Culture, Disability Representations, and the (In)Visibility of Cognitive Difference by Benjamin Fraser

No abstract available.

Self-determination, disability aesthetics and (refusals of) voice in the US–RMI Compact of Free Association

Abstract This article uses the framework of disability and voice to consider the consequences of nuclear weapons testing in the Marshall Islands among the Marshallese diaspora. The valorization of the voice as it signals the agentive individual is a modern phenomenon that denigrates the breadth of human and nonhuman movements through which Marshallese matrilineal agency is understood. I argue that Marshallese songs thus offer a testament to the myth of contemporary liberalism through vocalizations that resound the complex constellation of physical, mental and emotional ailments imposed upon the Marshallese (e.g., thyroid, sickness, 'denigrated intellect', etc.).

“Its Own Concentred Recompense”: The Impact of Critical Disability Studies on Romanticism

The field of Critical Disability Studies (CDS) includes a diverse range of methodologies for the ethical re-evaluation of literary texts. CDS has a growing relationship with Romanticism, addressing themes such as sublime aesthetics and poetic symbolism. A major function of CDS is the re-reading of texts in terms authors’ lived experience of disability, and the social environments in which they produced. To that extent, CDS is a continuation of the process of re-historicizing Romantic literature. Complementary to the historicizing function, a range of more conceptual theories continues to impact on Romantic studies, opening up new possibilities for reading and scholarship. This article attempts to provide a critical overview of this ongoing work, and a sense of its diverse and at times contradictory nature. Concepts and theories for discussion include disability aesthetics, deformity, metaphor, and the Romantic fragment. The article includes a close analysis of Byron’s poem “Prometheus”, which connects revolutionary myth with ideas of pain and silence, demonstrating the fundamental contribution made by ideas of disability to literary Romanticism. CDS can help to disrupt the canonical and institutional nature of Romanticism, and to include dissident voices—not only the witness of the non-normatively embodied, but of difference in general.

The Wheelchair: A Three-Part Drama

In a review for The New York Times, Amor Towles writes that Manhattan Beach “is far less interested in domestic relationships than in those of the workplace.” I would submit that Manhattan Beach is in fact suffused with domestic relations and that many of those relations are structured by disability plots. A few of those plot strands are so clichéd that you can hardly believe their prominence in this contemporary novel. But another cluster of the novel's disability motifs spins a fabric so inventive and rich that you begin to suspect Egan of deploying the other, shopworn plots chiefly to authenticate the novel's mid-century ethos, to evoke a moment when the American public tended to perceive disability as hopeless, or tragic, or repulsive. In what follows I extricate from the novel's broader historical concerns three of these related disability plots. I begin with an account of the disability-as-melodrama plot and then move to an analysis of the plotlines associated with novel's diffuse treatment of disability's generative powers. I close with a reading of the problematic plot that relies on what disability scholars call the “curative imaginary.” My aim here is to illustrate Egan's contrapuntal disability aesthetics.

Cognitive Disability Aesthetics: Visual Culture, Disability, Representations, and the (In)Visibility of Cognitive Difference by Benjamin Fraser (review)

Reviewed by: Cognitive Disability Aesthetics: Visual Culture, Disability, Representations, and the (In)Visibility of Cognitive Difference by Benjamin Fraser Elizabeth J. Jones Benjamin Fraser. Cognitive Disability Aesthetics: Visual Culture, Disability, Representations, and the (In)Visibility of Cognitive Difference. Buffalo: U of Toronto P, 2018. 257p. While disability studies as a field has grown substantially in recent decades, from Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s Extraordinary Bodies (1997) to Mitchell and Snyder’s seminal Narrative Prosthesis (2000), bodily difference has taken center stage while cognitive disabilities have been relegated to the margins. Benjamin Fraser’s most recent work moves beyond this focus on the physical to what he deems a second-wave of disability studies that examines frequently ignored cognitive disabilities. His emphasis on the cognitive coupled with an interest in the seldom investigated Spanish context makes Cognitive Disability Aesthetics doubly innovative. Fraser has previously written prolifically on disability in Spain and now builds and centers his critical lens exclusively on the visual culture of cognitive disabilities. Doing so highlights the way that they are made visible. In the process of analyzing Spanish texts, exhibitions, or films, he provides English translations, thus supporting his goal to “bring Anglophone readers [End Page 322] exposure to the Spanish context” while pushing Hispanic cultural and literary studies to include cognitive disability (19). To achieve these goals, Cognitive Disability Aesthetics is divided into two parts, each with three chapters, and an introduction and conclusion. “Part One: Theorizing Visual Disability Representations” establishes a theoretical framework that is then expanded and particularized in the textual analysis in “Part Two: Cognition, Collaboration and Community.” Part One’s most distinctive feature is Fraser’s ability to inhabit paradoxes and gaps in a way that demonstrates the rich zones in the visual culture of cognitive disability and invites further examination. For example, Chapter 1 studies canonical works in a way that both highlights their utility and underscores their marginalization of cognitive difference. Similarly, Chapter 2 does not reject negative or flat visual representations of cognitive disability. Instead, along with deficits and ableism, their examination reveals spaces of transgression. Chapter 3 continues this work of acknowledging deficits while highlighting utility. Fraser explores how visual forms can provide unique insight into the materiality of the cognitive disability experience, even though many might question the ability of cognitively able creators and producers to make such representations. Part Two applies this framework to particular representations using a diverse range of examples: the Trazos Singulares (2011) public exhibition, which artists with developmental disabilities helped create; movies; documentaries; and graphic novels such as María cumple 20 años (2015), a collaboration between a daughter with autism and her cognitively able father. These examples show how visual forms can encourage collaboration between the cognitively able and those with disabilities. Nonetheless, Fraser acknowledges why some would view such co-created visual representations as superficial or limited, while still asserting that they “may open a pathway toward understanding the experience of cognitive disability in an ableist world” (135). Chapter 5 treats Paco Roca’s 2008 graphic novel Arrugas, which features characters with Alzheimer’s. After establishing a basis for connecting aging and dementia to disability studies, Fraser evaluates its visual and textual components and establishes that the graphic novel highlights issues of interdependency and temporality in a way that both “problematizes and humanizes the Alzheimer’s experience” (147). By observing the visual representation and individual experience of schizophrenia in Abel García Roure’s documentary Una cierta verdad (2008), he stresses the need for a social model of cognitive disability that includes psychiatric illness. Fraser’s combination of theory and textual examination underscores the mutually-beneficial relationship between Anglo- and Hispanophone disability studies that has yet to be fully explored. He demonstrates how [End Page 323] traditional disability studies approaches can be utilized to illuminate Spanish texts. Similarly, he signals the gaps and gray spaces in canonical disability studies theory and how investigations beyond the Anglophone world can deepen our understanding of disability. Additionally, Fraser’s unique, exclusive focus on cognitive disability magnifies the lack of similar studies in Anglo- or Hispanophone realms. Fraser’s book does not claim to be a disability studies primer. It targets an audience with...

Relational Consent: Reflections on Disability and Jonathan Edwards's Aesthetics

ABSTRACTThe author retrieves Jonathan Edwards's understanding of consent as a model for conceptualizing political participation. Edwarsdean consent both presumes and reiterates a view of human flourishing as fundamentally relational. Attention to this notion of consent in Edwards's aesthetics invites a reinterpretation of civic participation as compatible with intellectual disability.

Reading Disability in a Time of Posthuman Work: Speed and Embodiment in Joshua Ferris' The Unnamed and Michael Faber's Under the Skin

This article analyzes a contemporary posthuman culture of work through a critical disability optic and, in particular, examines the disability aesthetics employed by Ferris and Faber in their novels. It opens with an outline of how contemporary post-industrial work cultures fixate on notions of speed and efficiency, and then reads the ideas of 'humanity', embodiment and power that result from this, before situating the difference of disability as a critique of such focus on immediacy and productivity. Ferris' and Faber's novels are read in terms of their analysis of disability and work, exploring how each creates complex ideas of embodiment, time and subjectivity from their very different contexts (the corporate world of the Manhattan legal profession in The Unnamed and an isolated alien/posthuman work environment of food production in Under the Skin). While offering a critique of the posthuman as it is figured in neo-liberal conceptions of work, the article concludes by suggesting the productive possibilities of aligning a critical posthumanist anti-humanism with contemporary disability theory in further understanding representations of work and disability.

Between art therapy and disability aesthetics: a sociological approach for understanding the intersection between art practice and disability discourse

What emerges as art and how it is categorised are parts of a collective process taking place in art worlds and involving a wide array of social actors. In this article, the relation between four ways of framing the intersection of disability and art is discussed. These frames are art therapy, outsider art, disability art, and disability aesthetics. The article suggests the frames and the way they relate to each other as important discourses in organising the relation between disability and art. The discourses’ relevance is demonstrated by discussing three cases of art practice among disabled people. The discussion of the cases demonstrates the importance of including more than one of the four identified discourses when analysing art practice involving disability. The concluding part discusses how the intersections of disability and art can be more closely linked to the mainstream art world through the concept of social practice art.

Flying? Falling? – Conflicting Representations of Disability in Kevin Kerr’s Skydive (2007) and Brad Fraser’s Kill Me Now (2013)

AbstractCanadian contemporary theatre is defined by a preponderance of previously marginalised discourses such as Feminist drama, First Nations drama, or Queer drama. The centre to periphery dispersal that has driven the Canadian cultural scene since the Massey Commission’s final report (1951) has favoured the rise of these traditions into public awareness. At the same time, the voice of disabled persons is hardly ever heard on Canadian stages. This paper takes a closer look at two recent texts, Kevin Kerr’sAfter a concise review of critical texts on disability studies, disability theatre, and disability aesthetics in order to establish an appropriate theoretical framework and terminology, the two plays are analysed for how they represent disability and disabled people. Kerr chooses to elide the different physicalities of his abled and disabled actors, establishing a transformative disability aesthetics. Fraser, in line with his usual modus operandi, opts for a more confrontational hypervisibility of his disabled characters and maximum emotional impact. Both authors are fully abled, however, so while their texts can be considered successful contributions to the representation of disabled persons on the contemporary Canadian stage, with diametrically opposed representational strategies, the question of an appropriation of voice remains pertinent.

The Curious Transformation of Boy to Computer

The Curious Transformation of Boy to Computer

On the Disability Aesthetics of Music

in memoriam Tobin Siebers # Introduction {#article-title-2} ### Questions Drawing on diverse interdisciplinary perspectives (encompassing literature, history, sociology, visual art, and, more recently, music), the field of disability studies offers a sociopolitical analysis of disability,

Aesthetics of Disability: The Growing Interest in Disability in Popular Hindi Cinema

Aesthetics of Disability: The Growing Interest in Disability in Popular Hindi Cinema