Pedagogy, Image Practices, and Contested Corporealities

Sarah Brophy, Janice Hladki

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317636847
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This volume focuses on popular film, television, and online representations of contested corporealities and contributes to visual culture studies, disability studies, critical pedagogy, and medical humanities. Emphasizing unruly embodiments that transgress and transform, the volume conceptualizes visual culture as a space of query and accountability. In their introduction, the editors underline how spaces of cultural production provide necessary contexts for analyzing the social impact of contested corporealities. Contributors, in turn, offer new perspectives on technologies, disability, and cultural production. Eunjung Kim argues that life-size dolls in contemporary art films show how acts of caring for radically passive bodies can emerge as both erotic and beautiful; Nicole Markoti? critiques the prioritizing of death as the most desirable, logical outcome in biopics of disability; and Katherine W. Sweaney's article on the online anatomization of an amnesiac's brain reminds us of the high stakes for medicine and science in the public display of knowledge-making. Working at the intersection of fat and critical race studies, Scott Stoneman discusses the body politics of the film Precious. Katerie Gladdys and Deshae E. Lott reflect on their lyrical installation about life with mechanical ventilation, and Ann Fudge Schormans and Adrienne Chambon examine how image-making by persons with intellectual disabilities can intervene in ableist-defined social space. With attention to queer theory and transnationalism, Michael Gill considers the British web-based RTV program, The Specials, where young men labeled as intellectually disabled fashion their erotic self-understandings as they discuss and appreciate an ensemble of Thai kathoey performers. Concentrating on the global politics of organ transplantation, Donna McCormack critically examines feature films that mediate questions of community, ethics, and mobility. The volume is further enriched by the inclusion of an interview in which Danielle Peers, Melisa Brittain, and Robert McRuer discuss the significance of crip possibilities in art and academia.

This book was originally published as a special issue of The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies.

Introduction: Pedagogy, Image Practices, and Contested Corporealities¹

Sarah Brophy and Janice Hladki

Democracy is no longer a given; it is an interrogation. There is not one democracy, but multiple democracies; there is not one form of documentary, but multiple documentary practices. Coupling these new documentaries with a notion of democracies requires a new cartography, one that is almost three-dimensional—like a hologram—composed of mobile, endlessly morphing layers of nation, borders, spaces, technologies, access, identities, transnationals, and pirates, where each layer is not parallel to any other, but all the layers are always in fact in relationships of varying impact and influence.

—Patricia Zimmermann (2000, 24)

This conjunction of affect and critical awareness may be understood to constitute the basis of an empathy grounded not in affinity (feeling for another insofar as we can imagine being that other) but on a feeling for another that entails an encounter with something irreducible and different [ … ].

—Jill Bennett (2005, 10)

This special issue began as a series of questions about the representation of health and bodies in visual culture: How do forms of visual culture provoke new ways of imagining trauma and illness, the representation of disenfranchised subjects, and the mediation of bodies by technologies? These questions generated two specific projects: our international conference, “Health, Embodiment, and Visual Culture: Engaging Publics and Pedagogies,” held at McMaster University in 2010, and this journal issue, which features a selection of the exciting research presented at that conference.

Our first thoughts about the conference were broadly shaped by concerns in Visual Culture Studies, a field that explores how individuals and groups visually represent human life and the social sphere, how spectators respond to visual forms, and how visual culture shapes everyday life. We sought to facilitate conversations about why and how modern human culture visualizes experience to such a great extent. As our epigraph from Patricia Zimmermann (2000) emphasizes, a multi-dimensional understanding of the relationships between visuality and democracy informed our conference design. Endeavoring to map what Zimmerman describes as a new visual-democratic “cartography,” we solicited papers addressing a broad range of media and political urgencies, and we encouraged the participation of activists, artists, and academics. Throughout this process, we paid particular attention to how visual culture—and the affective operations of art in particular—can contend with normative forms of sense-making about embodiment. Following Jill Bennett (2005), we attended to how and when contemporary visual culture generates unsettled forms of communication, empathy, and politics, thereby inviting ongoing contestation.

Collaboration is integral to our research methodology, and, from the beginning, we saw the conference as an occasion to engage students in creative, critical, materially grounded thought. In turn, the contributions of students, both graduate and undergraduate, became crucial to designing the program and to mounting an event that would be as accessible as possible for delegates with disabilities. We are deeply grateful to the core organizing committee members, Melissa Carroll, Emily Hill, Dilia Narduzzi, Sarah Trimble, and PhebeAnn Wolframe, for the thoughtfulness, critical reflexivity, energy, political savvy, focus, and practical skills that they brought to the conference project at every stage. Later on, Jessie Travis performed stellar work as our Volunteer Coordinator: She and Emily Hill collaborated with the Office of Human Rights and Equity Services at McMaster to develop and facilitate a workshop for undergraduate volunteers on accessibility goals, practices, and services for the conference. We extend particular thanks to Emily Hill and Sarah Trimble, who worked closely with us not only during the many months of conference planning and throughout the conference, but also in the development stages of this special issue. The conference would not have flowed as smoothly as it did without the high turnout of students from our graduate and undergraduate programs to assist with registration, accessibility, and navigating the campus. The organizing committee and the volunteers helped to create a stimulating and hospitable environment, and we hope that the students learned as much as we did, not only about visual culture, health, embodiment, disability provisions, and the logistics of conference organizing, but also about the joys, challenges, and political possibilities of working collaboratively.

In the early planning stages, we were energized by exchanges with students about potential organizing ideas and ultimately decided on technologies, cultural production, disability, and affect as the conference thematics. With the theme of “Technologies,” the conference recognized pressing public debates about bodily interactions with “old” and “new” technologies, the visual surveillance of bodies, and the implications of imaging practices for wellness, identity, and community. The idea of “Cultural Production” was resonant for the timeliness of its focus on a range of modalities, including film, video art, photography, performance, and digital arts. With this theme, the conference also emphasized political cultural practices, particularly as they have been developed by and about specific bodies—including persons with disabilities and Indigenous peoples—and in terms of diaspora, transnationalism, and biological citizenship. Developments in the growing field of Disability Cultural Studies are profoundly re-shaping understandings of normalcy, diverse embodiments, wellness, and representations of the body. In relation to the theme of “Disability” for the conference, the recent work of Robert McRuer (2006) and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (2009) exemplifies these provocations in relation to visual culture practices. Finally, Critical Affect Studies is an exciting new field of Humanities research that investigates art and culture by focusing on the imbrication of bodies, intimacy, sensation, shame, and ethical relations (Ahmed 2006, 2010; Berlant 1997, 2011; Ngai 2005). Central questions for the fourth theme, “Affect,” included what does it means to “see” and respond to visual culture and how is empathy generated by representations in visual practices of testimony and witnessing (Bennett 2005; Cartwright 2008)?

Papers at the conference engaged with technologies, cultural production, disability, and affect in a range of ways: always compelling, often surprising. The lively and innovative program included research on images of pain, blind photography in Mexico, representations of intersexuality, cinematic depictions of madness, the teaching of documentaries about sex work and violence, trauma in art installation, disability in reality TV, human rights brochures in Israel, the Body Worlds exhibition, race and gender in birth control commercials, and representations of Aboriginal women’s bodies. In developing this special issue of the Review, we sought to echo the interdisciplinary and international focus of the conference and to develop its engagement with a range of visual artifacts.

Articles in this special double issue advance critical perspectives on visual culture’s constitution of the “human” and regulation of citizenship possibilities. In “Why Do Dolls Die? The Power of Passivity and the Embodied Interplay Between Disability and Sex Dolls,” Eunjung Kim reads life-size dolls in contemporary art films as uncanny manifestations of the material objecthood of human bodies. Kim argues for a critical practice of de/familiarization in which acts of caring for radically passive bodies can emerge as both erotic and beautiful. Nicole Markotić critiques the prioritizing of death as the most desirable, logical outcome in biopics of disability, showing how genre norms and assumptions about virile masculinity work together to reinforce the association of disability with impairment and unliveability. And, situating his discussion of biological citizenship at the intersection of fat studies and critical race studies, Scott Stoneman, a graduate plenary panel member at the conference, discusses the body politics of the film Precious. The often contemptuous reception of Gabrielle Sidibe’s performance in the lead role of Precious reveals both fat stigma and racism, leading Stoneman to connect fat disgust directed at the body of an African American single mother with histories of race oppression in the United States and their ongoing impact on education, citizenship, and reproduction. Resonating with Kim’s and Markotić’s critical investigations of disability and passivity, Stoneman’s critical take on anti-fat rhetoric as a pernicious “norm of civility” that defines biological citizenship (Rose 1999, 69; 2006) underscores the urgent need to interrogate the injustices of what Robert Crawford (2006) calls “healthism” as it is articulated in relation to multiple modes of embodied difference.

In our co-curated exhibition, scheduled to coincide with the conference, we also explored questions about the regulation of citizenship, particularly for Indigenous, trans, and HIV/AIDS activist subjects, and about the performance of the human in, for example, representations of disability dance, scarred bodies, and human/animal relations. Generously funded and hosted by the McMaster Museum of Art, the exhibition, Scrapes: Unruly Embodiments in Video Art, presented contemporary video art that mobilizes bodies as sites of political, social, and cultural investigation. We imagined the idea of scraping as an agitation, capturing how the artworks “scrape”—uncover, and make trouble for—the regulatory mechanisms regarding the organization of normalcy as shaped by gender, race, disability, and sexuality. By establishing the Museum space as our conference hub, Scrapes facilitated remarkable opportunities. Three of the exhibition artists—John Greyson, Deirdre Logue, and Allyson Mitchell—“toured” the show with the conference delegates by discussing the aesthetic and philosophical interrelationship of the artworks. And renowned Anishinaabe multidisciplinary artist Rebecca Belmore offered a plenary performance piece addressing colonial legacies, embodiment, and the economics of the art world.

Many of the articles in this special double issue relate closely to the exhibition’s concern with “bodies in commotion”: unruly embodiments that transgress and transform. For example, Danielle Peers, Melisa Brittain, and Robert McRuer discuss the significance of crip possibilities in art and academia and elaborate on how McRuer’s writing about queer crip cultural practice/theory/activism generates vital ways to understand crip and queer excess and creativity “between movements, across bodies and borders” (this issue, 154). Lending further dimension to this conversation about inventiveness, Katerie Gladdys and Deshae E. Lott contribute an article about their collaborative art installation, Augmented Spirit: Extreme Embodiment, a critical, lyrical investigation of the life of a mechanical-ventilator-dependent individual. The authors’ installation and article argue for a complex recognition of the “creative process” (this issue, 109) that shapes vent-user Lott’s experience at the interface of body and machine. Although the Augmented Spirit project and the interview with McRuer both meditate on ways of disrupting “dominant cultural narratives on disability and its accompanying apparatuses” (Gladdys and Lott this issue, 108), Katherine W. Sweaney’s article on the online anatomization of an amnesiac’s brain in the context of Project H.M. reminds us that there are high stakes for medicine and science in the public display of producing knowledge of bodies and embodiment. Sweaney shows that even creative and innovative projects are at risk of being folded into long-standing Western narratives of science’s masterful visioning of bodily interiors—a mastery that, so caught up in displaying its own penetrative powers, tends to produce “humanity” as an abstract universal.

Two articles in the special issue engage with popular film and televisual representations of transnational circuits of embodied exchange. Michael Gill considers episodes of the British web-based RTV program, The Specials, where young men labeled as intellectually disabled fashion their erotic self-understandings as they discuss and appreciate an ensemble of Thai kathoey performers. Focusing on a different dynamic of exchange—the global politics of organ transplantation—Donna McCormack critically examines three feature films that mediate the attendant questions of community, ethics, and mobility. These two articles suggest that self-definition and, indeed, survival are contingent on how we constitute our relation to “others.” Taking Judith Butler’s body of work as a shared touchstone (1993, 2004a, 2004b), Gill and McCormack reflect on how such ethical questions suffuse popular media representations of health, disability, embodiment, and citizenship, suggesting, in turn, that fantasies of hospitable embodied encounters (Ahmed 2000; Derrida 2001)—that is, of an enlivening reciprocity—are a charged, persistent, and contradictory preoccupation within contemporary popular media.

Two keynote speakers from the conference, Tanya Titchkosky and Robert McRuer, contribute, respectively, an opening article and an Afterword to this special issue. These renowned Disability Studies scholars provide an insightful framing and contextualization for the other articles. Titchkosky’s article, “The Ends of the Body as Pedagogic Possibility,” posits that the concept of “ends” can help us to understand the edges that define normalcy/abnormalcy, inclusion/exclusion, and presence/absence. Titchkosky examines representations of disability in two cultural texts for how they rethink assumptions about disability as an individual impairment and as a threat to life and personhood. Committed to a method of “beginning in the middle of things” (this issue, 84) and to understanding bodies deemed as ends or “limits” as powerfully educational about what constitutes “the human,” Titchkosky echoes feminist scholars’ emphasis on the pedagogical potential of the limit moment and its tensions—a moment that becomes an opportunity to interrogate epistemological assumptions and to generate new questions...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Introduction: Pedagogy, Image Practices, and Contested Corporealities
• 2. The Ends of the Body as Pedagogic Possibility
• 3. Why Do Dolls Die? The Power of Passivity and the Embodied Interplay Between Disability and Sex Dolls
• 4. Augmented Spirit/Extreme Embodiment: A Mapped Landscape of Vent Life
• 5. The Reworking of Spatial Attribution: People with Intellectual Disabilities and the Micropolitics of Dissensus
• 6. The Narrator Witness: Dis/Connections Between Disability and Death
• 7. Crip Excess, Art, and Politics: A Conversation with Robert McRuer
• 8. The Specials Meet the Lady Boys of Bangkok: Sexual and Gender Transgression and Smashing Intellectual Disability
• 9. Intimate Borders: The Ethics of Human Organ Transplantation in Contemporary Film
• 10. “The Most Famous Brain in the World”: Performance and Pedagogy on an Amnesiac’s Brain 110
• 11. Ending Fat Stigma: Precious, Visual Culture, and Anti-Obesity in the “Fat Moment”
• 12. Afterword: The End of Contested Corporealities
• Index