Abstract
This chapter serves as an introduction to The Disabled Body in Contemporary Art second edition. It provides background on disability studies, as political and social movements for equal rights and recognition for people with varying disabilities, as academic disciplines, and as creative acts and productions for which people with disabilities represent themselves and their communities. I include the names of interdisciplinary disability studies and art history/visual studies books published and briefly describe a selection of exhibitions of the work of artists with disabilities held since the first edition of this book in 2010. I revisit the work of key scholars such as Lennard J. Davis, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, and Petra Kuppers and summarize the following seven chapters of this book.
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Notes
- 1.
Ann Millett-Gallant and Elizabeth Howie, eds., Art History and Disability, Special issue of The Review of Disability Studies vol. 10, n. 3,4 (2015).
- 2.
“Pieces of Cake: Pain, Trauma, and the Female Body.” Alex Wexler and John Derby, eds., The Routledge Companion to Art and Disability. (London: Routledge), p. 283–294; and “Watching One’s Back: Self-Portraits of Disabled Women’s Backs as Provocative and Protective.” Nicholas Chare and Ersy Contogouris, eds., On the Nude: Looking Anew at the Naked Body in Art (London: Routledge, 2022), p. 118–127.
- 3.
See https://indisposable.net/ (accessed on 3.1.2023).
- 4.
Who can think, what can think @ TeTuhi.
- 5.
Kingdom of the Ill @ MUSEION—Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Bolzano-Bozen; strikethrough in original title.
- 6.
See https://wellcomecollection.org/ (accessed on 3.4.2023)
- 7.
See https://amandacachia.com/ (accessed on 3.3.2023)
- 8.
Amanda Cachia, ed., Curating Access: Disability Art Activism and Creative Accommodation. Routledge, 2022.
- 9.
Major Disability Studies volumes of multidisciplinary critical analysis, personal essays, and poetry include, yet are not limited to the following: Lennard J. Davis, ed., The Disability Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 1997); David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, eds., The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997); Mairian Corker and Sally French, eds., Disability Discourse (Buckingham, UK, and Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press, 1999); Susan Crutchfield and Marcy Epstein, eds., Points of Contact: Disability, Art, and Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, c2000); Helen Deutsch and Felicity Nussbaum, eds., “Defects”: Engendering the Modern Body (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, c2000); Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky, eds., The New Disability History: American Perspectives (New York: New York University Press, 2001); Mairian Corker and Tom Shakespeare, eds., Disability/Postmodernity: Embodying Disability Theory (London and New York: Continuum, 2002); and Sharon L. Snyder, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, and Brenda Jo Brueggemann, Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities (Modern Language Association of America, 2002).
- 10.
For a thorough explanation of medical models and their social and political implications see Simi Linton, Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity, forward by Michael Bérubé (New York and London: New York University Press, 1998).
- 11.
Lennard J. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (London and New York: Verso, 1995).
- 12.
See, for example, Alan Gartner and Tom Joe, eds., Images of the Disabled/Disabling Images (New York: Praeger, 1987); Martin F. Norden, The Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical Disability in the Movies (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, c1994); David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, c2000); and Paul K. Longmore, “Screening Stereotypes: Images of Disabled People in Television and Motion Pictures,” in Why I Burned My Book and Other Essays on Disability, 131–146 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003).
- 13.
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).
- 14.
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Staring: How We Look (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
- 15.
Lynda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity, and Sexuality (London; New York: Routledge, 1992).
- 16.
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, “Seeing the Disabled: Visual Rhetorics of Disability in Popular Photography” in The New Disability History: American Perspectives, Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky, eds., 335-374 (New York: New York University Press, 2001).
- 17.
Garland-Thomson, Seeing the Disabled, 339.
- 18.
David Hevey, The Creatures that Time Forgot (London and New York: Routledge, 1992).
- 19.
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, “Staring Back: Self-Representations of Disabled Performance Artists,” American Quarterly 52, no. 2 (July 2000): 334-338; “Dares to Stares: Disabled Women Performance Artists & the Dynamics of Staring,” in Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance, Carrie Sandahl and Philip Auslander, eds., 30-41 (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2005).
- 20.
Petra Kuppers. Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on Edge (New York London: Routledge) 2003.
- 21.
Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993). Phelan’s argument is rooted in Lacanian psychoanalysis regarding the primacy of the gaze in the formation of identity and social structures of meaning. Underscoring that Lacan proposed the gaze as necessarily social, Phelan explains the co-dependent dynamics of the gaze, in which one looks at the “other” in order to define the self. The desire to gaze at the “other,” Phelan argues, results from the failure to see oneself. For Phelan, Lacan’s mirror stage, in which the subject sees itself only as an illusion, serves as a metaphor for how visual images always fail to account for the whole of subjectivity and always reflect more about the desires of the producer and viewer of the images than the body on display.
- 22.
Phelan, 11.
- 23.
This photograph can be found in Witkin & Witkin: A Photographer, A Painter (Mexico: 2016) 2007, p. 77 and in “Conclusion: Staring Back and Forth,” The Disabled Body in Contemporary Art (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Witkin & Witkin (Trisha Ziff, dir. 2017); “The Model: Ann,” Witkin & Witkin: A Photographer, A Painter (Mexico: 2016), 75-83. A shorter version of the essay can be found on my website. Modeling for Joel-Peter Witkin: https://www.annmg.com/essays; The blog post in which I describe attending a 2018 Documentary Film Festival in Washington DC to view the film Witkin & Witkin: https://www.annmg.com/single-post/2018/09/21/for-joel-trisha-and-all-the-remarkable-women.
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Millett-Gallant, A. (2024). Curating This Collection. In: The Disabled Body in Contemporary Art. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48251-9_1
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