The Routledge Handbook of Disability Arts, Culture, and Media

Bree Hadley, Donna McDonald, Bree Hadley, Donna McDonald

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351254663
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

In the last 30 years, a distinctive intersection between disability studies – including disability rights advocacy, disability rights activism, and disability law – and disability arts, culture, and media studies has developed. The two fields have worked in tandem to offer critique of representations of disability in dominant cultural systems, institutions, discourses, and architecture, and develop provocative new representations of what it means to be disabled.

Divided into 5 sections:

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• Disability, Identity, and Representation

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• Inclusion, Wellbeing, and Whole-of-life Experience

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• Access, Artistry, and Audiences

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• Practices, Politics and the Public Sphere

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• Activism, Adaptation, and Alternative Futures

this handbook brings disability arts, disability culture, and disability media studies – traditionally treated separately in publications in the field to date – together for the first time.

It provides scholars, graduate students, upper level undergraduate students, and others interested in the disability rights agenda with a broad-based, practical and accessible introduction to key debates in the field of disability art, culture, and media studies. An internationally recognised selection of authors from around the world come together to articulate the theories, issues, interests, and practices that have come to define the field. Most critically, this book includes commentaries that forecast the pressing present and future concerns for the field as scholars, advocates, activists, and artists work to make a more inclusive society a reality.

1
Introduction

Disability arts, culture, and media studies–mapping a maturing field

Bree Hadley and Donna McDonald

The way we see, speak, and think about disability – in real life, and in fictionalised representations of real life in the arts, the media, and popular entertainment – defines disabled identities, which in turn defines disabled people’s access to agency, authority, and power in society. In this Introduction, we want to review historic and contemporary studies in disability arts, culture, and media studies, identify current challenges in the field, and set the scene for the chapters engaging these topics to come in this collection. Most critically, we want to highlight the benefits an understanding of this field – and the practical, philosophical, and at times provocative diversity of approaches, aesthetics, and politics discussed in this collection – can bring, not just for scholars of arts, culture, and media but for scholars across education, social services, science, health, and medicine, as they think about the way the rights of disabled people are reflected or not reflected in their own systems, institutions, and discourses.

Interest in the way arts and media representations shape the lives of disabled people sits at the intersection of two fields of study – disability studies and disability-focused arts, culture, and media studies. In the last 30 years, a distinctive intersection between disability law, service, advocacy, and activism studies and disability arts, culture, and media studies has developed. This, as Kirsty Johnston notes, is because the upsurge in interest in how disability is represented in drama, theatre, dance, film, television, literature, visual art, media, and entertainment from the 1980s forward is connected to the upsurge in advocacy, activism, and rights initiatives in the same period (Johnston 2012, 6). Both disability studies and disability arts, culture, and media studies are driven by the belief that disability is best understood not through the lens of a medical model, which sees disability as an individual problem to be controlled or cured, but through the lens of a social model, which sees disability as the product of social, institutional, architectural, and representational systems that preclude the full participation of those with corporeal and cognitive differences in society (Abberley 1987; Oliver 1992). Though pain and impairment may be embodied phenomena that we need to acknowledge, and are acknowledged in subsequent nuancing of the social model, the prejudices which disabled people encounter in their everyday lives are external social phenomena which are enacted, re-enacted, and re-envisaged in encounters across many media and in many contexts throughout the course of our lives. This social construction of disability is something which scholars, activists, and artists working in disability studies and in disability arts, culture, and media studies seek to investigate and intervene in. Disability studies examines the social structures that impact on disabled people’s lives. Disability art, culture, and media studies engages with the socially constructed stories that drama, theatre, dance, film, television, literature, art, media, and entertainment tell about what it means to be disabled. These stories include provocative, parodic, and unconventional representations of disability as a minority experience marginalised by the images, discourses, and institutions of mainstream culture.

Over the course of the past 30 years, disability studies and disability arts, culture, and media studies have worked in parallel, and in productive conversation, as mutually committed contributors to the disability rights movement in the US, UK, Europe, Asia, Australasia, and elsewhere. The scholars working in the fields draw on each other’s expertise and insight to provide compelling accounts of the way disability is defined in dominant cultural systems, institutions, and discourses. In disability arts, culture, and media studies, scholars also deliver insights into how arts and media workers are developing new accounts of what it means to be disabled and adapting, adopting, and imagining new production platforms, aesthetics, and audience engagement techniques to assist disabled people to speak back to the stereotyping they are subject to in the public sphere. For this reason, a working understanding of the practice and research taking place at the intersection of disability studies and disability arts, culture, and media studies is important for anyone seeking to understand how the disability movement is manifest in contemporary culture, and how it is pushing to change perceptions and create a society more inclusive of disabled people.

A historic overview of disability arts, culture, and media studies

At this critical stage of the field’s development, the range of scholarly literature that attempts to identify, document, and describe art, culture, and media practice about, with, or by disabled and d/Deaf people is large. It ranges from theoretical analyses of disability signifiers in screen, stage, aesthetic, and social performance (Garland-Thomson 1996, 1997, 2009; Mitchell & Snyder 2000; Siebers 2010; Johnston 2016), to theoretical analyses of the part disabled people have been called on to play in fairs, sideshows, freak shows, and other popular media and culture phenomena (Bogdan 1988; Garland-Thomson 1996, 1997; Adams 2001; Chemers 2008), to accounts of contemporary disability arts practices (Kuppers 2003, 2011; Sandahl & Auslander 2005; Kochhar-Lindgren 2006; Lewis 2006; Davidson 2008; Hickey-Moody 2009; Henderson and Ostrander 2010; Johnston 2012), to accounts of spectators’ relationships to such art forms and artists (Hadley 2014). Accounts of professional, experimental, and political arts and media practice by disabled people run parallel with accounts of arts, health, well-being, and therapy projects and practices with disabled people (Payne 1993; Cattanach 1999; Rubin 1999; Jones & Doktor 2009; Moon 2011; Malchiodi 2012; Bates, Bleakley & Goodman 2014; Clift & Camic 2016).

The earliest scholarly engagement with disability arts, culture, and media studies was through historical and theoretical analysis of fairs, sideshows, and freak shows. From Robert Bogdan’s Freak Show (1988) to Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (1996), Rachel Adams’ Sideshow USA (2001), and Michael Chemers’ Staging Stigma: A Critical Examination of the American Freak Show (2008), the literature in this field has consistently shown the pivotal role representations of the disabled body play in defining the bounds of the ‘normal’ and the ‘abnormal’ human body.

Analyses of freak shows as a specific form of popular entertainment have been followed by accounts of the way representational practices in drama, theatre, television, film, literature, and the visual arts more broadly have used the disabled body as what David T. Mitchell and Sharon Snyder (2000) call a “narrative prosthesis” – a figure of trauma, tragedy, pity, terror, or inspiration – to prop up dominant culture accounts of what it means to be human. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (1997) and Staring: How We Look (2009), Tobin Siebers’ Disability Aesthetics (2010), and Kirsty Johnston’s Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism (2016) all contribute to growing field of scholarship.

In the last 15 years, analyses of mainstream representations of disability have been joined by analyses of disabled artists’ own self-representation practices, in books and articles that examine how disabled arts and media makers are challenging problematic legacies of representation, creating and co-creating their own aesthetics, and creating and co-creating their own communities of practice. This includes examination of the work of specific practitioners, companies, or practices, as well as examination of whole series of work in specific art forms such as performing arts, visual arts, or the media, in specific countries, or in other specific contexts. Amongst the most influential are Petra Kuppers’ Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on Edge (2003) and Disability Culture and Community Performance: Find a Strange and Twisted Shape (2011); Gerard Goggin and Christopher Newell’s Digital Disability: The Social Construction of Disability In New Media (2003); Ann Millett Gallant’s The Disabled Body in Contemporary Art (2010); Richard Sandell, Jocelyn Dodd, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s Re-Presenting Disability: Activism and Agency in the Museum (2010); Katie Ellis and Mike Kent’s Disability and New Media (2011); and Kirsty Johnston’s Stage Turns: Canadian Disability Theater (2012). The field has also begun to consider the question of how spectators respond to these practices more explicitly, beginning with Bree Hadley’s Disability, Public Space Performance, and Spectatorship: Unconscious Performers (2014).

As the field has matured, understanding the work of specific practitioners, companies, and categories of work has become a focus. This includes, for instance, analysis of d/Deaf practices in Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren’s Hearing Difference: The Third Ear in Experimental, Deaf, and Multicultural Theater (2006) and Michael Davidson’s Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body (2008). It also includes analysis of intellectual or learning disability in theatre, such as in Anna Hickey-Moody’s (2009) Unimaginable Bodies: Intellectual Disability, Performance and Becomings, and Matt Hargrave’s (2015) Theatres of Learning Disability: Good, Bad, or Plain Ugly? The volume of interest in intellectual or learning disability theatre is also clearly flagged in a number of collections investigating responses to representations of intellectual disability or learning disability in theatre, including Helena Grehan and Peter Eckersall’s (2013) ‘We’re People Who Do Shows’: Back to Back Theatre – Performance Politics Visibility, on the work of Back to Back Theatre (Australia), and Sandra Umathum and Benjamin Wihstutz’s (2015) Disabled Theater, on Jérôme Bel’s controversial work with Theater HORA (Switzerland) in the production Disabled Theater.

As the field has gained momentum, and interest from arts, culture, and media scholars more broadly, other collections have offered broad accounts of the field, albeit focused on either artmakers or media makers, but not both, in the way this collection does. This includes Susan Crutchfield and Marcy Epstein’s Points of Contact: Disability, Art, and Culture (2000); Sheila Riddell and Nick Watson’s Disability, Culture, and Identity (2003); Carrie Sandahl and Philip Auslander’s Bodies in Commotion: Disability & Performance (2005); and Bruce Henderson and Noam Ostrander’s Understanding Disability Studies and Performance Studies (2010). Though these collections are mainly dated to the early 2000s, and mainly US-, UK-, and Europe-focused in the practices their contributors discuss, they have provided a valuable point of introduction for the larger numbers of scholars acquiring interest in this field in the last decade.

Most recently – and appropriately for a field that has reached a point of maturity, where common understandings exist, central debates are known, and attention turns to how we do what we do and how we negotiate contestation amongst ourselves about pathways forward – attention has turned to how we teach and research and introduce others to this topic. Petra Kuppers has published a short Theatre & Disability resource text (2017) and a Studying Disability Arts and Culture (2014) textbook, each designed to assist scholars in introducing disability arts, culture, and media practices to students in the classroom from the earliest stages of their university studies.

Though accounts of arts, health, well-being, and therapy projects address arts practice with disabled people, as well as with other marginalised communities, it is interesting to note that these have tended to sit somewhat separately from accounts of professional, experimental, community, independent, and political practice about, with, and by disabled people to date. Introductions to arts therapy like Judith Rubin’s (1999) Art Therapy: An Introduction; handbooks like Helen Payne’s (1993) Handbook of Inquiry in the Arts Therapies, Cathy Malchiodi’s (2012) Handbook of Art Therapy, and Stephen Clift and Paul Camic’s (2016) Oxford Textbook of Creative Arts, Health, and Wellbeing: International Perspectives on Practice, Policy, and Research; analyses of issues like Susan Hogan’s Problems of Identity: Deconstructing Gender in Art Therapy (1997); and ‘how to’ guides about processes, protocols, and media in this work like Ann Cattanach’s (1999) Process in the Arts Therapies, Phil Jones and Ditty Dokter’s (2009) Supervision of Dramatherapy, and Catherine Hyland Moon’s (2011) Materials and Media in Art Therapy tend to be focused on advice for practitioners assisting people with their mental health, communication skills, and community engagement skills rather than on the issues of agency, power, and political impact in the public sphere foregrounded in other disability arts, culture, and media studies work. As a result, work on health, well-being, therapy, and outreach programmes in the past decade has tended to be by a different group of scholars, working on different issues, for different readers. A push towards emphasis on professional, political, or social artistic practices located outside a therapeutic paradigm in both disability arts industry practice and disability arts scholarship has amplified this sense of separation in the field (Murakami 2012, cited Austin et al. 2015). There has thus perhaps been less mutual identification and cross-fertilisation between the arm of the field in which scholars work on disability arts, culture, and representational politics and the arm of the field in which scholars work on disability arts, outreach, and therapy, and even some hesitancy around engagement based on ongoing desire to differentiate disability arts, culture, and media studies from medical models of disability.

Current issues in disability arts, culture, and media studies

With this sizeable legacy of scholarship to draw on, the disability arts, culture, and media studies field is no longer the under-researched sector it was a decade ago. It has reached a stage of maturity, moving past the stage of initial statements, summaries, and surveys that establish the value of studying the work, and past initial attempts to coin terminology and theory to suit analysis of the work. Those entering or expanding the field now can make use of foundational work by the aforementioned practitioners and scholars as a basis to articulate core principles succinctly and go on to exploration and at times contestation of specific issues in relation to the production, presentation, reception, or critique of work.

In line with the emphasis on professionalisation in the industry in the last ten years, most scholars working in this field at present acknowledge and attend to professional, pre-professional, community, and political practices, addressing disabled people as leaders with agency and authority in these practices. The cutting edge of debate in the field currently focuses on the way disability disrupts conventional representation, communication, or aesthetic models, the way the mainstage is co-opting this disruption as part of its innovation agenda, and the problems this co-option presents for the aesthetic, professional, and political agendas of disability arts (Hargrave 2015; Umathum & Wihstutz 2015). There is concern that artists and the scholars they study may be suffering from their own success in showing the ways in which the disabled body can destabilise the aesthetic and political impact of representational practices. There is suspicion that mainstage practitioners may be making use of the aesthetic possibilities of the disabled body without necessarily acknowledging the legacy of effort in establishing the need for disabled people to take leadership in exploring these aesthetic possibilities. The field today is also increasingly interested in analyses of the way artists and their publics are moving to new and more ‘democratic’ digital media platforms to communicate their aesthetic and political messages in a context where access to the mainstream remains challenging (Ellis & Goggin 2015; Ellis, Goggin & Kent 2015; Ellis & Goggin 2016; Hadley 2017b). Though analysis of how changes in the policy, industry, and production climate around these disability arts and media practices impact on the aesthetics, politics, and business models for the work have been less frequent – in disability arts and culture studies, if not in disability media studies – more work in this area is starting to emerge. The field includes one oft-cited chapter on different models of disability arts (Perring 2005) and one article on the way evolutions in policy lead to evolutions in practice in a particular country’s context (Hadley 2017a). As some of the contributions to later sections of this book show, this is an area of interest for the future, and the question of how practitioners are becoming leaders, albeit accidental leaders, adapting practices, and finding ways to make these industries accommodate them is a valuable new path for future work. For practitioners and scholars alike, there is a desire to ensure that ebbs and flows in the funding, publication, and promotion of disability arts and media practices over time do not stall the continued evolution of the field or create a situation in which lack of visibility of past work leads new researchers entering the field now to reinvent rather than evolve the work.

Challenges in disability arts, culture, and media studies

As might be expected of a maturing field, scholars working in disability arts, culture, and media studies are highly conscious of the way the aims, approaches, and outcomes of their research are framed and the way terminology flags this framing. As initial analyses of representations of disability across mainstage arts, culture, and media practice demonstrated, disabled people have often been represented as figures of trauma, tragedy, pity, terror, or inspiration. Even today, cheats, charity cases, and inspirations constitute the vast majority of mainstream representations of disabled identities. Most mainstage representations are still embodied by non-disabled performers in ‘crip drag’ as it has been called (Mazzeo 2016). Those working in disability arts, culture, and media studies thus tend to be suspicious of any terminology, or any research aim, approach, or outcome, that positions disabled people as subject, spectator, or research participant rather than as producer of culture. The field, in parallel and in collaboration with the industry it investigates, has debated the relative merit of terms, aims, approaches, and outcomes designed to take the conversation beyond these limited and limiting terms. In some cases, terminology is drawn from disability studies – discussion of social models versus medical models, disabilities versus impairments, and people with disabilities versus disabled people is as frequent in scholarship as in the industry studied. In other cases, terminology is drawn from the industry – differentiation between art and disability, disability arts, and disabled artists, or between inclusive arts and integrated arts, for instance. The field typically acknowledges and expects strong differentiation between art and disability as a facilitated practice in which typically non-disabled artists work with disabled people, disab...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: disability arts, culture, and media studies: mapping a maturing field
• PART I Disability, identity, and representation
• PART II Inclusion, well-being, and whole-of-life experience
• PART III Access, artistry, and audiences
• PART IV Practices, politics, and the public sphere
• PART V Activism, adaptation, and alternative futures
• Index