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Rosemarie is a professor at Emory University, and is one
of the leading people thinking about disability studies.
And I just want to take this moment with our Diversity
Summit to kind of reflect on the how new things come into
our discussion.
And I showed earlier our definition of diversity, and
all of the things that it included.
But I think, truly, for us to live up to that broad
definition, there's work to be done in many areas.
And I had, I guess, I'd call it the good fortune of driving
up to DIA yesterday, because we were worried about
Rosemarie getting here, and had a chance to visit in the
car a little bit.
And you can read about her many accomplishments.
I think you're going to really appreciate
Rosemarie as a person.
And I'm so glad she could join us today.
So please welcome Rosemarie.
So thank you, very much, Kee, for that introduction.
Thank you for the invitation to come here to participate in
the Diversity Summit.
It's a terrific concept.
I'm honored to be here.
I want to, in particular, thank, as I said, Kee, and the
Office of Diversity--
and now we say, Inclusion--
for the invitation to come, the opportunity.
I'd like to thank my colleague and friend, Emily Nussbaum,
for helping to coordinate my visit.
And I'd also like to thank the Departments of Sociology,
Women in Ethnic Studies, and the Matrix Center for
coordinating a series of workshops and presentations in
association with the Diversity Summit, here, that I think are
very productive.
It's been really enjoyable for me to learn what kinds of
diversity initiatives are being brought forward, here,
on this particular campus, and to contribute, in some way, to
thinking about how these various diversity initiatives
can all work together in our goal of creating a more
accessible world that is more socially just.
So, as I said, thank you, very much.
And thank you for all coming.
Please feel free to eat, and relax, and to share in my
presentation.
So what my title here is, Out and About in Spheres of
Learning; How Disability Integration
Transforms Public Space.
What I'm presenting to you, today, can you look
at it in two ways.
One is that it's, in some ways, a brief history of
disability in public.
Another way of thinking about my presentation here today is
that I'm going to give you a series of, what I sometimes
call, disability stories.
Now stories, of course, we know are explanations.
They're ways that we understand the world we live
in, the way we understand our own lives,
ourselves, and others.
Stories, in other words, help us make sense of our lives.
And of course, because of the human variations that we think
of as disabilities are some really fundamental to every
life, our culture has many, many stories about disability
that has evolved in response to changing cultural
developments and patterns.
So part of what I'm going to talk about are these stories
of disability, and to give them names.
So for most of history, disabled people out in the
public world have been beggars.
In fact, historically, access to economic resources for
people with disabilities came from public begging, or
sometimes from private family resources.
The figure of the crippled beggar has been made familiar
to us, of course, in many cultural settings, by well
known artworks, in particular, such as this 1525 painting by
Peter Bruegel.
Or the famous 1916 photograph of a blind beggar, by the
American photographer, Paul Strand.
From ancient to modern times, disabled people have also been
displayed--
and I've done a lot of work in this area, I think it's really
very interesting--
in public as objects of wonder for entertainment.
In the 19th century, for example, a set of enslaved
conjoined twin women, who had the stage name
Millie-Christine, were part of the popular culture of
curiosities who performed as entertainment before audiences
across the country.
They were the kind of the first disability celebrities
in Western culture.
So similarly, the couple with the stage name Maximo &
Bartola, who we would consider today, probably, people with
developmental disabilities, were displayed as what were
called the Aztec Children in the 19th century.
People of color, in particular with what I call spectacular
or unusual disabilities, such as these entertainers, and of
course the very famous original so-called Siamese
twins, were the most sought after of these performers,
because they seemed doubly exotic to audiences who were
fascinated by these extraordinary sights.
The development of scientific medicine gained authority, as
we all know, in the late 19th century, as a way to
understand humanity, and a way to interpret human variation.
So at the same time that people with disabilities were
being displayed for entertainment as curiosities,
they were also being used as medical specimens, as I'm
showing you here, in the early medical photographs of
Millie-Christine and Maximo & Bartola.
So stripping them, these subjects, of their dignified
costuming and they're posing in the entertainment
discourse, de-emphasizes their faces, and it exposes the
parts of their bodies that are
understood as medical anomalies.
And thus, dehumanizes them by presenting them in these
medical contexts.
The idea of normal, and with it, of course, it's opposite,
the idea of abnormal, are the primary ways that we
understand disability in our modern era.
So this concept of normal is derived
from statistical averages.
And in fact, most people, most human beings, depart from
normal in all ways.
What gets considered abnormal, of course, become highly
stigmatized according to this medical model of human
variation, with which we're all familiar.
In the first half of the 20th century, disability is
primarily understood, especially in the Western
context, as a medical condition to be cured.
And disabled people are treated largely in hospitals.
And they're confined to institutions.
Charity and sympathy are the most common responses, in the
first half of the 20th century, to disability and to
disabled people.
Organizations, for example, such as The March of Dimes,
tell a story of cure, and a story of sympathy in campaigns
that want to eliminate disability
through medical treatment.
The very most negative version of disability as pathology,
which I've mentioned, is this supposed science, the pseudo
science of eugenics, which arose in the late 1800s in the
West, and came to prominence in the Western world, in
general, in the first decades of the 20th century, as a
progressive--
and this is important--
scientific and political initiative that would,
supposedly, improve--
this was the term that was used--
the human race, by encouraging people of so-called higher
value, the valued citizens, to reproduce.
And also, by eliminating the people of
so-called lower value.
Now Germany and the United States collaborated on eugenic
research and reproductive policies, such as forced
sterilization, in that first decades of the 20th century.
Nazi Germany took eugenic thinking, of course, to its
logical conclusion, by developing a eugenic
euthanasia program to exterminate people that it
considered unfit.
This Nazi propaganda poster that I'm presenting captures
the logic of eugenics by using the authority of statistics--
and remember I mentioned the authority of statistics in
establishing normal as the criteria that we achieve, or
try to achieve--
so the statistics predicted the large growth of the,
supposedly, inferior populations in Germany, in
contrast with the shrinking populations of the, supposed,
superior people.
Nazi Germany's first eugenic project to advance the
so-called *** race, was to round up Germans who had
disabilities in institutions that ranged from orphanages to
medical care facilities, and to transfer them to
extermination facilities, where the Nazis, in
cooperation with medical practitioners--
and this is very important--
developed the gas chambers and the sham medical examinations,
which were later used in the more ambitious Nazi project to
exterminate the Jews of Europe and other groups who were
considered to be eugenically inferior.
By the mid 20th century, however, our emerging
collective knowledge of the Holocaust discredited eugenics
as a formal science.
The concept of progressive politics shifted, in the US
and elsewhere--
but I'm going to concentrate a bit here on the US--
beginning in the 1950s and the 1960s, from the eugenic
project of eliminating stigmatized groups from the
national population, to including a wider variety of
people who had been previously excluded by segregation laws,
by discriminatory attitudes, and by structural exclusions.
The larger Civil and Human Rights Movement in the US, and
elsewhere, emerged in various forms in mid century, creating
legislation, changing practices, and demanding the
inclusion of previously excluded groups, including
women, African Americans, people with disabilities,
*** minorities, and other ethnic and minority groups.
The Disability Rights Movement emerged, then, in tandem with
the other civil rights movements, in primarily the
1960s and the 1970s.
Its focus was to integrate people with disabilities into
the public sphere by removing architectural barriers, by
creating an accessible built environment, by desegregating
public education and the workplace, and by providing
anti-discriminatory legislation.
The inclusive built environment that began to
appear in the 1960s, starting primarily in the US with the
Architectural Barriers Act of 1968, made it possible for
people with disabilities to literally enter the public
sphere in order to exercise the rights and the obligations
of democratic citizenship.
The idea--
the very idea--
of according civil and human rights to people with
disabilities, transformed what I'm calling here the stories
of disability as exclusively a charity, or a medical issue
that transformed these stories dramatically.
So while these stories about disability certainly persists
now, in our, sort of, public understanding of disability,
news stories about disability have flourished.
And I'm going to focus on those newer stories, those
newer narratives of disability for the remainder of my talk.
For example, the Breast Cancer Movement used political
understandings of disability to demand recognition and
treatment for breast cancer, beginning in the 1970s, with
women activists who displayed mastectomy scars as a form of
social protest.
And they extend, even today, through the many Pink Ribbon
Movements that we're familiar with.
In 1993, for example, the fashion model and cancer
survivor, breast cancer survivor, named Matuschka,
appeared on the cover of the Sunday, New York Times
Magazine bearing the marks of breast cancer, her mastectomy
scars, with the headline that said, very boldly, "You can't
look away any more." So with that, breast cancer begins to
appear in public.
Although full integration and equality is always, of course,
an aspirational ideal, as we know, in a democratic society,
the concept of disabled people as a minority group entitled
to civil and human rights has changed our shared disability
stories, if you will, quite significantly.
The traditional story, the traditional narrative, the
traditional understanding of disabled people as
inspirational, for example, has moved, in part, from a
story of cure--
for example, such as the March of Dimes would have presented
in the 1930s--
to one in which disabled people live successfully with
disabilities, rather than trying to eliminate those
disabilities.
And this is the significant shift.
This part of a positive disability politics that
emerges in the 1960s with the larger Disability Rights
Movement and the larger Civil Rights Movement.
So a recent series of inspirational ads, for
example, replaced the sympathy narrative with dignity.
Such as, images of--and I really like this young woman
who's got her 15 minutes of fame and become a celebrity as
a result of her becoming disabled.
Her name is Bethany Hamilton.
She proudly displays her disability, which is to say
her amputated arm, which she lost to a shark while she was
surfing in Hawaii.
And apparently there is a wonderful film about her life,
the name of which, of course, has flown out of my head, and
I don't have it in my notes.
But she's quite a well known celebrity, certainly among our
students, as I'm given to understand.
So the kind of traditional stories that I've been
presenting to you about disability, and the images
that carry them, of course, continue to persist today in
tandem with these new, what I call, civil and
human rights stories.
So disability has always been an opportunity for vivid and
succinct metaphors.
So I'm an English professor, and this is my favorite part.
For example, many of the terms that we use today as a kind of
shorthand to discredit something, are unrecognized
references to disability.
When we want to say something is bad, or wrong, or to
discredit it in some way, we often call
it disability metaphors.
Such as lame, a lame idea.
We call things stupid.
We call things dumb, crazy, blind, insane, idiotic,
moronic, retarded.
All of which are words for different kinds of what we
think of as disabilities.
Stock disabled characters, such as the blind beggar that
I've talked about, are taken up as ways to discredit.
Such as, this fabulous economical cartoon from a
recent New York Times, which uses the blind beggar figure,
gets refashioned, in this political
cartoon, as an elephant.
So it's an elephant dressed like a blind beggar.
And it's used to criticize the Republican Party's supposed
lack of vision.
And I think it's a really wonderful cartoon.
There's the glasses that are associated with the blind
beggar figure.
There is the tin cup, and around the neck of this
Republican elephant figure is a sign that says, "No vision,"
which is a reference to the Paul Strand photograph that
says "Blind" on it, from 1916.
And perhaps most significant is the blind beggar elephant
figure that is tripping a passerby down in the corner of
the cartoon, to suggest, of course, that this is not just
a blind beggar, but it's a fake blind beggar, which is
part of the history of blind beggars as fakes.
As people who are trying to get money by
pretending to be disabled.
So this is part of the discriminatory discourse of a
disability.
And of course, this passes without comment, as simply a
vivid metaphor.
So because disability is both, as I suggested, omnipresent in
human experience, and also it's a very intense aspect of
the human condition, it's been taken up quite frequently as
an occasion for drama.
And for effective meaning making in art, in theater, in
literature, in film, and of course, in advertising, as I
think we've seen a little bit of.
For example, one of the founding stories of Western
literature is Oedipus, Oedipus the King, who
was a disabled character.
He was a character with lameness, and of course, with
blindness at the end of the story.
And these characters who are disabled throughout Western
history lend both theatricality and symbolism to
a variety of stories that are founding
stories of Western culture.
So one of the many theatrical uses that I'm working on now,
myself, of disability in American culture, is a very
popular folk opera, Porgy and Bess, which depends, for its
effectiveness, on the character Porgy's disability,
to mark him as both distinctive and noble, and to
drive forward the plot.
And I'm showing a representation, here, of the
recent Porgy and Bess that was performed on Broadway in 2011,
in conversation with the 1959 film portrayal of Porgy by
Sidney Poitier.
It's a very interesting juxtaposition.
So this has been a long visual discourse of disability around
Porgy and Bess.
And of course, a discourse of race and gender representation
at the same time.
So it's a very fruitful source for analysis.
So one influential post Civil Rights disability story that
has been taken up in popular media, advertising, and
commercial culture, casts disability as a form of
cultural diversity.
And this is, in some ways, the most productive set of images
and possibilities, I think, that we might consider here
today, given the fact that we are present at a diversity
summit, which, again, is a wonderful concept.
And these images and cultural products cast disability, as I
said, as a form of cultural diversity.
Television programs featuring disabled characters who are
neither tragic, nor evil, such as the television program--
which isn't on anymore, of course, they come and go--
called Life Goes On, which starred the actor Chris Burke,
who has Down's Syndrome, reflect both the idea and the
reality that people with disabilities are integrated
into the mainstream world.
Perhaps the surest indicator, of course, of the entry into
the realm of cultural diversity of any group is to
be represented in the Barbie Pantheon, which occurred with
the emergence in 1997 of Share a Smile, Becky, which is
interesting, not Barbie, but actually Becky, a separate
character, who appeared in her fashionable pink and purple
wheelchair.
It's worth noting, of course, that Becky, along with her
sensible shoes and legs that bend at the knee, may be the
only truly feminist Barbie doll.
So more recently, popular television programs, such as
Glee, introduced disabled characters to add both-- and I
think this is really important-- a kind of hip
diversity, and a cheerful theatricality to their plots.
Whether the wheelchair using character named Artie Abrams
will get a date to the dance, or whether the aspiring
cheerleader with Down's Syndrome will be selected for
the team, drive forward the drama.
And they add interest to Glee, which is basically a comedy.
And having disabled characters in a comedy, as opposed to a
tragedy, I think is quite politically progressive.
So the show also benefits, of course, from the publicity
surrounding controversies about non-disabled actors
playing disabled roles.
And about disabled actors such as Lauren Potter, finding--
she's the person who plays the cheerleader, the woman with
Down's Syndrome--
finding non-disabled roles.
So it's an opportunity for public conversation,
especially in teaching, around some of the politics of
representation and inclusion, in terms of disability.
So the entry, I'm submitting here, of disabled people into
the world and into the media, has produced a cadre of
disabled celebrities whose stories and whose images range
much beyond earlier disabled celebrities,
such as Helen Keller.
So one example--
and I like to talk a lot about this example--
is the fashion model, the actress, the champion runner,
and the TED speaker, whose name is Aimee Mullins.
Aimee Mullins has very much fashion model looks.
She looks eerily like a Barbie doll.
And she has a shape, this Barbie S-shape.
Mullins is also-- and this is really what's interesting--
a double amputee from just below the knee.
She quips that, "Disability is actually a great advantage as
a fashion model," because she can make herself as tall as
she wants to be.
She has prosthetic legs that range from fashion to
cosmetic, that are really interesting.
And she displays her disability and these
prosthetic legs, always, as a part of her chic image.
And she uses, as I suggested, this wide variety of fashion
legs, in order to make a distinctive style for herself.
The famous designer, for example, Alexander McQueen,
has fashioned a number of high fashion outfits for Mullins,
that accentuate her disability as part of a
general fashion statement.
So disabled people have entered and transformed--
oh I'm sorry--
I'm a slide behind here.
So some images I'm presenting of Mullins, here, giving her
TED talk, and displaying some of her various legs.
And with her costumes that Alexander McQueen has
designed for her.
Disabled people had entered and transformed sports, as
well, as have women, of course, since Title IX, in
this post Civil Rights Era.
For example, South African runner Oscar Pistorius, who
has been in the news recently in the most unfortunate of
circumstances, challenged the Olympic Committee to be
allowed to compete in the Olympics.
And in fact, did compete in the Olympics, as well as the
Paralympics that were held in London last summer.
Although the case is still being worked out in detail,
the Olympic Committee-- and this is the interesting part--
initially refused Pistorius on the basis that his prosthetic
legs would give him an advantage over runners with
fleshly legs.
And what this brings forward is the interesting idea that
disability might be an advantage, rather than a
disadvantage.
Also in the same vein, the South African runner named
Caster Semenya presented the question of whether biological
gender ambiguity--
and again, this case is still being discussed and emerging,
which is of course traditionally, gender
ambiguity, which is traditionally called
hermaphroditism--
might pose an advantage, rather than a
disadvantage in sports.
So these are very interesting.
Disability sports is very interesting, emerging cultural
discourse, I think, to follow.
One of the most interesting, in my view, and of course,
controversial uses up what I'm calling disability
theatricality, comes from, none other than, Lady Gaga,
who has kind of displaced Barbie, in some ways, in
popular culture.
And Lady Gaga uses disability prosthetics, such as
wheelchairs, crutches, eye patches as sensationalist
fashion accessories and costuming in her music videos,
and in her live performances.
For example, in July of 2011, Lady Gaga rolled out for
performances in Sydney, Australia, using a wheelchair.
And she was egged, apparently, by her audiences, who thought
that, I guess, she crossed some sort of line between her
signature outrageousness, and an offensive appropriation of
disability by using this wheelchair as part of her
extravagant costuming.
The question, in my view, that is most interesting is whether
Lady Gaga's, what I call prosthetic accessorising, is
discrimination as some kind of a form of disability drag, or
minstrelsy, or whether it's-- and I would support this
understanding--
is a creative costuming that indicates that disability
prosthetics have moved out of the stigmatized world of
medical treatment, and into the edgy, high fashion culture
of costuming.
In the last decade, disability has been appearing not only in
popular culture, but in public art.
In 2005, for example, a controversial statue called
Alison Lapper Pregnant, by British artist, well known
British artist, Mark Quinn, won a prestigious public art
competition that placed it in one of the most famous sights
of public conversation in the Western world.
And that is, Trafalgar Square in London.
The statue, which was on display, but has been cycled
out, follows one of the most traditional sets of
conventions in Western art, the nude marble statue of a
woman on a pedestal.
However, this woman, Alison Lapper, who herself is an
artist, is not only significantly disabled, but
she's pregnant.
The statue, thus, fuses and expected art form-- and this
is my point--
with an unexpected subject.
And it, thus, produces a kind of artistic hybrid that is
both original and compelling.
The statue, therefore, fulfilled a really important
purpose of public art by posing questions for public
debate about, for example, what's an
appropriate subject of art?
What kinds of people might be represented appropriately in
public space?
Who has been left out of
representation in public space?
And perhaps most crucially, who and who should not be
reproducing and parenting in our
particular cultural moment?
Alison Lapper Pregnant, the name of the statue, also gains
its authority from its reference to the most famous
double upper amputee in the history of Western art.
And that is the Venus de Milo, who has been on display before
the public for many years in the Louvre Museum in Paris.
So the sculptor and artist, Mark Quinn's statue has
benefited, interestingly, the career of Alison Lapper, who
is a photographer as well as an artist.
So the hand-less Alison Lapper has recently published an
autobiography that, I think, has one of the best ever
ironic titles for a life writing narrative, and it's
called My Life in My Hands.
And, of course, Alison Lapper is hand-less.
I've worked a lot on traditional Western
portraiture in relation to people with disabilities.
So portraiture is a way of commemorating and honoring the
subjects of these portraits.
Disability rights and cultural leaders are beginning to be
celebrated in this traditional art form of the portrait.
So a portrait, for example, of the playwright and author
Susan Nussbaum by artist Riva Lehrer, gains resonance, and
it gains authority, similarly to Alison Lapper Pregnant, by
making a reference to one of the most famous portraits of
the 20th century.
And that is, Pablo Picasso's, 1906 portrait of the seated
Buddha-like Gertrude Stein.
So Gertrude Stein's solidity, in this portrait, and her
engaged leaning in posture, for which she's very famous,
and for which Picasso is very famous in this portrait, is
replicated by Reva Lehrer in her portrait of Susan
Nussbaum, who is seated equally solidly to Gertrude
Stein, but seated in her wheelchair.
Unusual or particularly theatrical--
as I call them-- disabilities have often been made the
subject of photography because, of course, they
further photography's expression of realism.
The American photographer Diane Arbus, photographed
unusual disabled people, such as Eddie Carmel, the so-called
Jewish Giant in this really famous photograph that many of
us are familiar with.
The effect of Eddie Carmel's size is accentuated in Arbus'
photograph, very effectively, by his juxtaposition to his
parents placed in their living room.
And of course, the parents and the living room become
diminutive, miniaturized, by the presence of the very large
Eddie Carmel.
The photographer Annie Leibovitz, who is a
photographer of unusual people, photographed the
political activist named Jennifer Miller, a bearded
woman, whose beard may be called--
a term that I use-- an appearance impairment.
And she produced, Leibovitz produced a very striking
portrait of Jennifer Miller, a nude portrait, in which
Miller's beard, which of course is the traditional mark
of masculinity, opposes, in this nude photograph, the
triangular *** area, which is the traditional mark of
femininity.
And these photographs both achieve a kind of dramatic
effect, then, by accentuating these atypical forms of human
variation that can be considered as disabilities.
The photographer Kevin Connolly, I've done some
research on his work.
He was born leg-less.
And he travels the world on a kind of low riding skateboard
that he prefers to use to a wheelchair for mobility.
And he has reversed in his photographs the photographic
gaze, the traditional photographic gaze, that was
established, for example, by photographers such
as Diane Arbus by--
this is what Kevin Connolly does.
He's gone around the world in his travels photographing
thousands of people that he has captured with his
photographic gaze, looking at him.
So this distinctive angle of his camera captures the
surprise in the faces and the postures of the people looking
at him as he turns back their gaze toward him upon them, to
reveal their surprise as they encounter
such an unusual person--
and this is the important thing--
out and about, wielding a camera in the public world.
Disabled people, of course, have always contributed to
making culture-- and this is a really important point--
but they have not often been recognized as disabled people.
And their influence, and the influence of their
disabilities, have not often been recognized in art and the
making of culture.
For example, the French impressionist artist Claude
Monet, developed low vision in later life as, of
course, most people do.
As his vision changed, however, his paintings
changed, as well, to become not only less focused, but, of
course, most significantly, more impressionistic.
Disability--
and this is one of my most important points--
often prompts artistic creativity and other forms of
creativity, and evolution, and what we might call problem
solving, innovation.
Because it affects, and it often changes the relationship
between an artist's body and that artist's work.
The contemporary artist, for example, Chuck Close, known as
the founder of photographic realism, evolved a style of
painting that arose from the changes in his body that came
from paralysis.
Now Chuck Close's early self-portraits were composed
according to a very fine grid.
And as he became disabled, his hand required a larger grid, a
much larger grid, that produced a
different kind of portrait.
Disability has promoted, in fact, it's demanded that Chuck
Close evolve his art, change his artistic practice.
The disability story here that I'm drawing from Chuck Close's
artistic production, is that Close continues to make his
art, not in spite of his disabilities, but because of
his disabilities.
Disability acts, here, then, as a prompt, I've suggested,
for resourcefulness, for adaptability, and for
creativity.
Not necessarily as this lack, or a limitation, which are
these older stories that I've been suggesting are being
displaced with the post Civil Rights understanding of
disability, and disability rights,
and disability inclusion.
The entry of disability into contemporary dance is, I
think, one of the most vibrant new forms of disability
culture to be produced, and to show us how disability can
evolve artistic form.
So the introduction of the wheelchair into contemporary
dance, it's been suggested, is the most important
technological innovation since the invention of
the toe shoe in ballet.
There are many disability integrated dance companies.
Sometimes it's called disability dance.
Sometimes it's called integrated dance.
Sometimes it's called mixed ability dance.
I'm actually quite interested in several forms
of disability dance.
One is the disabled dancer whose name is Bill Shannon,
who goes by the stage name--
I love this--
Crutchman.
He's also evolved a new dance form using crutches that he
requires for mobility in fashioning them with the
rocker bottom--
so he uses traditional crutches that he has put a
rocker bottom on--
in order to evolve a new form of break dancing choreography,
and a whole set of moves that are very distinctive to not
only his body, but to the prosthetic crutches that he
uses for mobility and that he uses for dancing.
So Shannon's dancing is so compelling, that is, it has
been used in mainstream advertising for a really
interesting ad that you can take a look at on YouTube, for
Visa credit cards.
It's actually rather controversial.
So perhaps, the most radical and counter-intuitive, I want
to say, disability story--
and I'm going to end with this-- that I want to offer
you today is what I call the story of disability as beauty.
The late activist and disability rights lawyer named
Harriet McBride Johnson wrote about living as a
significantly disabled person.
What she wrote is, "I guess it's natural enough," she
said, "that most people don't know what to make up the us."
She means people with disabilities out in public.
She says, "Two or three times in my life, I have been looked
at as a kind of rare beauty."
I was quite taken by this concept of rare beauty.
And I wrote about it in the book I wrote on staring.
And I wanted to end with images that I'll describe to
you, and offer to you, from art, and photography, and
painting, that capture, in some ways, this rare beauty
that can be found, I submit, in disability.
And this rare beauty emerges from distinctiveness, I want
to suggest, rather than from ordinariness.
It arises from struggle rather than comfort.
And it arises from the unusual and the unexpected
rather than the usual.
And I have here two images.
One is from a fashion shoot done by Nick Knight, based on
fashions designed by Alexander McQueen.
I had presented to you, and talked a little bit earlier
about Aimee Mullins, who Alexander McQueen designed
costumes for.
So I think it's a very effective and affecting
portrait of a woman of small stature, who has a very
distinctive asymmetrical hairstyle, a very asymmetrical
body, a very asymmetrical, let's say, evening gown.
She seated.
And she presents herself engaging directly the gaze of
her audience with her eyes.
A very sophisticated, a very dignified look.
This woman is a very unusual person that we don't typically
see in conjunction with the visual
discourses of high fashion.
And I want to submit that this is an interesting intervention
in the way that public images and public discourses present
disability to us.
The other photograph that I'm presenting here, comes from
integrated dance.
This is a dance company out of New York called GIMP.
It is a photograph, a very interesting photograph, of a
woman who is a dancer named Catherine Long.
She is a one-armed woman.
And she's posed in a black outfit of contemporary dance.
Her head is off to the side.
She has a very upright pose.
And her left shoulder, or her left arm, which you might say
ends in a shoulder, which is pointed a little bit, a very
interesting and very unusual form of embodiment that's very
hard for us to visually recognize here.
It's a very unreadable photograph.
Her arm, which is very short, we might say her stump, her
amputated arm, is pointing upwards.
And her fully extended arm, her right
arm, is hanging downward.
And it's a really interesting, very sculptural pose, that
brings forward what I want to suggest might be the
unusualness of disability beauty.
And I think I might have, oh, I have another few images that
I might share with you, if we have another minute or two.
These are some portraits that I have been working on of
people with disabilities.
And interesting, some portraits of people with
significant disabilities.
A portrait of a woman of small stature sitting on a wall.
A kind of Humpty Dumpty image.
A portrait of a person with significant burn scarring,
which is a series of portraits of burn survivors, which were
commissioned.
And a portrait of a woman with a very unusual face, dressed
in a very dignified costume of what I call the Vamp.
Thank you.