Disability Arts Research Articles

Drawing Torah from Troubling Texts

Abstract This article argues for the importance of developing queer feminist disability ethics in ways that push beyond the conventional canon, acknowledging the violence present in many traditional texts and their failures to do justice to lived disability experience. Critiquing a famous debate in the Babylonian Talmud, Ketubot 17a, in which Hillel and Shammai debate the permissibility of telling a lie in order to praise the beauty of a disabled bride at her wedding, the author argues for a Jewish disability ethics that engages secular disability arts. Examining the artistry of queer disabled dancer Claire Cunningham, the essay draws out the embodied ethical insights expressed through disability arts and argues that Cunningham's work offers a more compelling answer to the Talmud's question—in her claim that love lodges in the tangible acts of paying attention to another.

Drawing Torah from Troubling Texts: Gender, Disability, and Jewish Feminist Ethics

Abstract This article argues for the importance of developing queer feminist disability ethics in ways that push beyond the conventional canon, acknowledging the violence present in many traditional texts and their failures to do justice to lived disability experience. Critiquing a famous debate in the Babylonian Talmud, Ketubot 17a, in which Hillel and Shammai debate the permissibility of telling a lie in order to praise the beauty of a disabled bride at her wedding, the author argues for a Jewish disability ethics that engages secular disability arts. Examining the artistry of queer disabled dancer Claire Cunningham, the essay draws out the embodied ethical insights expressed through disability arts and argues that Cunningham's work offers a more compelling answer to the Talmud's question—in her claim that love lodges in the tangible acts of paying attention to another.

Representing Disability, D/deaf, and Mad Artists and Art in Journalism: Identifying Ableist Fault Lines and Promising Crip Practices of Representation

This paper revisits the dynamic discussion about journalism’s role in representing and amplifying disability arts at the 2019 Cripping the Arts Symposium. Chronicling the dialogue of the “Representation” panel which included artists, arts and culture critics, journalists, and scholars, it reveals how arts and culture coverage contributes to the cultivation of disability, D/deaf, and mad art. Given that the relationship between journalism and disability communities continues to be fractured in Canada, speakers were invited to reflect on journalism and disability arts in relation to their own engagement with media as subjects, authors, and critics of disability arts reviews. The methods for presentation were cripped in multiple ways to provide the fullest access possible. The panel concluded with examples of ableist fault lines in representation practices where the disabled figure is an absent “ghost” in journalistic representation, warnings against journalistic reliance on traditional and objective narratives, and a call for artists to claim and write their own stories. Ultimately, disabled, D/deaf, and mad artists need both control over artistic endeavours and output and influence over representation. This article reconnects journalism and disability communities, ultimately demonstrating that representation is a critical, co-constitutive process that can become more aesthetically and politically oriented toward social justice in its focus on disability, D/deaf, and mad arts.

Beyond Measure? Disability Art, Affect and Reimagining Visitor Experience

Disability, mad and d/Deaf arts are motivated to transform the arts sector and beyond in ways that foreground differing embodiments. But how do we know if such arts-based interventions are actually disrupting conventional ways of experiencing and consuming art? This article presents three themes from a critical literature review relevant to curating and creating artwork meant to spur social change related to non-normative bodies. We highlight examples that push beyond standard survey measurement techniques, such as talk-back walls and guided tours by people with lived experiences. We also explore the myriad affective outcomes of art and how we might measure emotional reactions, recognizing that disability itself is imbricated in structures of feeling. We argue that such efforts must integrate concepts of access from the field of critical disability studies. Ultimately, tools for measuring audience response to politicized art must contribute to challenging and transforming these structures.

Neurodivergency and Interdependent Creation: Breaking into Canadian Disability Arts

Disability arts has traditionally been understood as that which is led, created, and/or curated by disabled artists. While disability arts and culture in Canada has continued to grow and develop over the last number of decades, I have perceived a notable lack of neurodivergent artists being included at disability arts events and community gatherings. I question if this lack of representation may be due in part to this perception of disability arts as having to be led exclusively by those with lived experience of disability. In this paper, I will critically engage with concepts of inter-abled artistic collaboration, interdependency and the need to re-imagine disability arts leadership structures to better include neurodivergent artists and their allies. I will further position my ideas around this topic within the context of the roundtable discussion on the future of disability arts leadership that took place at the Cripping the Arts Symposium in 2019.

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.

Cripistemologies of Disability Arts and Culture: Reflections on the Cripping the Arts Symposium (Editors' Introduction)

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Collaborating on Togetherness and Futurity in Disability Arts

Collaborating on Togetherness and Futurity in Disability Arts

A Sonic Journey with Alex Bulmer

Alex Bulmer is a blind multidisciplinary artist who has worked extensively in Canada and the United Kingdom. Aside from her work as an actor, musician, video artist, and playwright, Alex is known for her work in disability arts and advocacy. Recently, she has been involved in curating formative disability arts events, including The Republic of Inclusion (2015) with the National Arts Centre and Cripping the Arts (2019) at Harbourfront Centre. In the following conversation, we explore the genesis of her connection to sound and trace the trajectory of her sound-based performance work in music, film, theatre, and experimental performance. We also discuss Alex’s unique perspective on the intimate nature of listening, her distinction between noise and sound, and her connection to the human voice.

Dementia in Dramaturgically Hybrid Performance and the Performance of Objects

In my research about dementia and its representation in contemporary theatre, I have found that works that employ parataxis are conducive to narratives that foreground the experience of characters with dementia. Parataxis refers here to a dramaturgy in which theatrical elements are placed alongside one another, instead of in a hierarchical arrangement (Lehmann 2006). This article considers several hybrid performances about dementia for how the stage objects featured behave differently, whether they serve to diagnose dementia to the audience, embody narratives of their own or transcend these functions altogether. I discuss hybridity as it pertains to form, specifically that of dance theatre or puppetry theatre. In a paratactical dramaturgy, physical forms like dance can sit alongside the spoken word and take on equal signifying power, as opposed to acting as secondary or merely complementary. From biology I borrow the notion of hybrid vigour and argue that such mixed forms fulfil needs that arise in the telling of neurodiverse stories, which I discuss by drawing on research by disability arts scholars. This enables me to analyse examples of hybrid dramaturgies in puppetry performance, dance theatre, physical theatre and other forms for their staging of dementia narratives and the performance of objects. I then employ theory about stage properties to compare and distinguish the exceptional performance of objects in dementia-themed theatre. The dementia symptomology complicates relationships with objects: on the one hand, they can embody memories, while, on the other, clinical features of dementia make objects unfamiliar and unwieldy. Performances that lean further away from the dramatic tradition are seen to be more apt to present stage objects in ways that transcend their typical dramatic function, and thus potentially present alternatives to the strained object relationality that people with dementia can experience.

Disability Art: Potential Intersections in Studio Practice With Artists Labeled/With Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities

While the intersections of normalization and outsider art have been articulated in studio art therapy practice with people labeled/with IDD, little attention has been given to the intersection of art therapy, artists labeled/with IDD and disability art. As a counter-cultural endeavor rooted in a political movement, disability art offers a distinct and potentially fruitful framework in which art therapists in studio practice with artists labeled/with IDD can advance social justice.

Art, Disability, and Pediatrics: Applying a Disability Studies Framework

The Artist in Residence at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland offers an arts program that is deeply engaged with the field of disability studies. By moving beyond an exclusively medicalized model of disability, hospitalized children and adolescents are situated as experts on their own lived experience. Artists, art therapists, and pediatric healthcare professionals can afford young people more avenues to engage in creative dialogue with topics related to disability arts and culture. These concepts are highlighted through three examples: stop-motion animation, closed-circuit television show, and art exhibitions that feature disabled artists.

Jean Vanier on Beauty and Disability

Jean Vanier offers a unique concept of beauty in which beauty is described as inherent in all human beings and revealed in right relationships. According to Vanier, revealing the beauty of every individual is part of the Christian mission and one that requires Christians to properly see and care for persons with disabilities. This essay explores how Vanier’s conception of beauty fits into the larger context of Christian notions of beauty, as well as ways in which revealing beauty through art can be transformative for Christians. The essay begins with a short history of the Western conception of beauty, focusing on the “Great Theory of Beauty” and how it was taken up by Christian theologians. Next, the authors explore Vanier’s own writings on beauty to see how they cohere with and depart from other philosophical and theological conceptions. Finally, the authors discuss how disability art can provide another way in which to recognize the beauty of disability as Vanier understands it.

Allyship in disability arts: roles, relationships, and practices

ABSTRACTIn this article, I propose that investigation of allies, ally skills, and allyship in disability arts is overdue. I articulate some of ways in which non-arts approaches to allyship need to be adapted to meet the needs of disabled artists, given the aesthetic as well as professional and social dimensions of allyship distinctive to disability arts. In doing so, I highlight the need for new theory, terminology, and frameworks to define the different approaches to allyship, developed by different artsworkers, operating in different roles, across the different domains of disability arts and/or arts and disability practice.

Rippling excesses: A/r/tography becoming dis/a/r/tography

Abstract How do disability arts (dis/arts) and culture rupture and transform conventional artistic and a/r/tographic practices? We show how disability arts and culture involves a multiplicity of voices unfolding, recursing, rippling and reflexively performing public pedagogy to make the Wingspan retreat of artists and scholars. We revisit both Hofstadter's formalistic and ahistorical conception of recursion and Irwin's a/r/tography to ask how artistic practices and genres reflexively transform. Our research foregrounds disability collectivity without forsaking individuality, fragilities, strengths, differences of disability that require accommodation and communication beyond the binaries of ability/disability, and, purported 'normalcy' and 'irregularity'. This article artistically and intellectually plays both with the unfolding of a/r/tography as recursive processes often in tension and contention with discourses of 'ability' and 'normalcy' that so bind who counts as valued human beings (or not) and whose semiotic excesses matter. Recursive transformations may become larger sociocultural movements of disability politics and collectives with history, agency and polyvocality. To respect such differences and yet exceed them in the span of wings is the provisional and mighty task of the disability arts, culture and public pedagogical movement.

Teacher education for inclusion and anti-oppressive curriculum development: innovative approaches informed by disability arts and narratives

ABSTRACT This paper engages with the issue of teacher education for inclusion and particularly with the approach of employing disability arts and narratives of people with disabilities in university based courses for inclusion. It draws on three examples of anti-oppressive curricula that were developed as part of a graduate university module in Cyprus that encouraged student teachers to engage with disability arts and narratives in order to understand key ideas developed in disability studies and inclusive education. The three examples presented in this paper are representative of the three approaches all the participating student teachers followed, and indicate the strategies they used and the nature of the materials they chose. The discussion considers how these approaches can further inform teacher education for inclusion and how using disability arts and narratives can inform the discussion on other issues concerning teacher education of inclusion.

Legitimacy and ambiguity: institutional logics and their outcome for people with intellectual disabilities

Organisations providing services for people with intellectual disabilities operate within a context of legal, moral, and institutional frameworks. This article uses an institutional framework to analyse two types of welfare organisations for people with intellectual disabilities in Sweden: inclusive education and disability arts. These two empirical cases show that because disability organisations operate at the intersection of different institutional spheres, their aims and activities are subjected to differing, and at times conflicting, expectations. Using an institutional framework helps to identify the influence of conflicting logics and external roles on the daily encounters that professionals have with people with intellectual disabilities. The findings raise ethical considerations about the moral status of people with intellectual disabilities in contemporary society.

Artistic Impact: From Casual and Serious Leisure to Professional Career Development in Disability Arts

All forms of arts participation are likely to lead to positive outcomes, but the nature and reach of these outcomes will differ. While arts programs have increasingly found favor in disability communities, these programs historically have been oriented toward therapeutic outcomes. They have not been taken seriously in terms of artistic outputs, the deeper benefits for participants, or potential wider societal impact. At the same time, there is anecdotal evidence of increasingly sophisticated artistic engagement involving artists with disability that are gaining wider public attention, popularity, and enabling a serious leisure experience for the artist with the opportunity for professional artistic career development. This article demonstrates how disability arts projects enable opportunities for casual leisure, serious leisure, and professional artistic engagement and examines the resultant social impact for each. To do this we investigate the characteristics and outcomes of three projects through an abductive research design involving a comparative qualitative case-based approach.

Vital (Johannine) Signs: ‘Crip-tic’ Enactments of a Man at the Pool (John 5:1-18)

Abstract John 5:1-18 is here interpreted ‘crip-tically’ (through a crip hermeneutic) which seeks to pay due attention to the man at the pool and his ‘enactments’. In order to subvert notions of what Alison Kafer has termed ‘curative time’, here this sign is seen to afford something other than a normalisation or physical healing of a body. Inspiration is drawn from two recent disability arts exhibits – Liz Crow’s Bedding Out (2012-2013) and Noëmi Lakmaier’s One Morning in May (2012) – and their respective illustrations of crip time and movement to highlight how the man in John 5:1-18 too has the potential to subversively refigure ‘normative’ understandings of time, space and embodiment within the Gospel.

Introduction: Cripping the Arts in Canada

Disability arts are political. Disability arts are vital to the disabled people’s movement for how they imagine and perpetuate both new understandings of disability, Deafhood, and madness/Mad-identity and create new worldly arrangements that can hold, centre, and even desire such understandings. Critically led by disabled, mad, and Deaf people, disability art is a burgeoning artistic practice in Canada that takes the experience of disability as a creative entry point.