Disability Arts: The Opposition to Awkwardness
Our individual ideas of the human body are regularly adapted by the illustration, photography, and film present in our day to day lives. The design and photography our country celebrates often predict what we deem as acceptable; thus, setting an undeniable standard for the time period. We set standards for people to stick to as a way of weeding out the unfamiliar. It’s the unfamiliar that makes the “average” person uncomfortable — a looming presence deciding many of our actions and guiding our conversations. It’s funny to me how we never live in fear of very tangible dangers like alligators or the sun despite their harmful capacity — primarily because unlike antagonists from a horror movie, we understand them and their motives leaving us little to guess. Developing an understanding of our surroundings is a crucial part of building familiarity and shaping a sense of comfort around the things we rarely see every day.
Visual arts have been used to shape our familiarity with different physiologies expanding across humans, plants, and animals since the earliest moments of human history. Diagrams and three-dimensional models showcasing our observations have repeatedly been used to encase how we remember our world around us. Many works of film and literature form their basis off of the ability art and storytelling have in making even the most uncomfortable characters feel familiar by simply humanizing them. It’s this same ability used in art and film to convince other people using vulnerability that I believe is crucial to advocate for a specific cause. This exact same idea of storytelling and narrative is currently needed in the disabled community. In fact, a past survey conducted by Scope.org found that three-fourths of people actually find themselves feeling uncomfortable talking to disabled people (Ryan). It’s necessary to picture what this means for an entire section of humanity. Averted eyes, fumbled conversations, and being ignored for your able-bodied friend next to you — all scenarios caused by people feeling uncomfortable talking to someone living to a different standard than their own. Obviously, this is an issue; one that disability-scholars are taking steps to examine. Though, I believe the disabled community needs to emphasize a more effective tool for communicating normality to their audience, one that we’ve literally used for centuries — art and visual media.
Disability art is an approach I see as a necessity for the wellbeing of the disabled community since it speaks purely to emotion through imagery and storytelling. Our understanding of the ideal body changes overtime and often coincides with the imagery ubiquitous within that decade. Disability art: performative, visual, and written, uses this to its advantage by making disfigured bodies appear natural and vulnerable. Pages of tangible evidence and theorem examining the naturality of the average body doesn’t speak to the working-class adult — someone with little experience with the unfamiliar because they have bills to pay, hungry children, and relationships to nurture in their own home. Professors and students like myself draft thesis’ ascertaining any from a list of things they see wrong with the world while forgetting the privilege they have — only thinking of establishing their most “important” and “urgent” principles without realizing how small their audience really is. Less than half of the US is college educated and an even smaller margin of people have the emotional availability to care about an issue like disability inequality (VOA). Academic work with no narrative, no emotion, and no familiarity or common experience speaks to such a small entitled minority of our country’s population it’s unthinkable that effective change could realistically draw from it.
An important precaution necessary to convince the average person to care about something completely outside of themselves is providing them with a reasonable, impactful, reason to do so. It’s ridiculous to expect any working-class American to pause their daily contentions in order to advocate for a social issue like disability inequality that’s so far removed from their day to day life — even worse is that a majority of Americans rarely encounter other disabled people on a regular basis (Ryan). Members of the physically disabled community are something abled bodied people stare at, avoid, and are generally startled by because it’s not who they would expect to see ahead of them in line at the grocery store. The average American has very little to no acting experience with other disabled people. Bars, football stadiums, and music venues are all examples of places that for the majority are widely inaccessible to the disabled community. Awkwardness, in this case, is a result of us pushing an issue or undeveloped skill to the very recesses of our minds until suddenly having that heated moment of “oh GOD no”, “what do I DO” and having to confront it (Riley). For people to understand and have more respect for the disabled community it’s necessary that we help them connect to it and understand its naturality.
Emotion and imagery are more effective tools for speaking to the absolute average American than pure logic; people make illogical decisions every day, fearing conversation with disabled people being one of them. Art, music, and performance can be greater understood through education; though, color, shape, movement, and composition are facets of these mediums that humans are naturally capable of understanding despite their economic status, gender, race, or language. Common experience and emotional reasoning are integral to communicating with a larger section of humanity; furthermore, disability art has the amazing capacity to reach a nearly universal audience.
Art is a necessity for making the abstract and the taboo familiar in the life of the average American. The concept of living with a disability is so unthinkable in the U.S. it’s not uncommon to hear something along the lines of “I’d kill myself if that happened to me”. Disability is so far removed and unthinkable to so many Americans they’d rather die than succumb to an alternative lifestyle. Disabled bodies should be emphasized on stage, in film, and across art pieces until they become normal and appreciated by more people. Arts portray narrative and evoke emotions capable of quickly making the unfamiliar and uncharted appear beautiful. Disability art is made as a result of disability rather than being made in spite of it. Disability art is never meant to embody the works of able-bodied creators but instead share lived alternative perspectives in a format that can be understood by nearly anyone regardless of age, education, sexuality, or language (Stahl 1). This work emphasizes the importance of community in the disabled population by sharing the anxieties the stressors and the beauty lived by people apart of it (Cameron). While scholarly texts often pile their readers with logical conclusions as to why they should share an opinion, disability art leads the viewer to their own opinion by giving them a glimpse into another perspective. Disabled bodies and lifestyles should be seen as natural and accepted as they are. Making these images more commonplace in our media is the first and most important step.
Works Cited
Voa. “US Census: Americans Are More Educated than Ever Before.” VOA, VOA — Voice of America English News, 29 Aug. 2018, learningenglish.voanews.com/a/us-census-bureauAmericans-are-more-educated-than-ever-before/4546489.html
Stahl, Devan. “The Prophetic Challenge of Disability Art.” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics, vol. 39, no. 2, Fall 2019, pp. 251–268. EBSCOhost, doi:10.5840/jsce2019102312
Cameron, Colin. “Disability Arts: the Building of Critical Community Politics and Identity.”Politics, Power and Community Development, edited by Rosie R. Meade et al., 1st ed., Bristol University Press, Bristol, 2016, pp. 199–216. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1t896hc.16. Accessed 16 Apr. 2020.
Ryan, Frances. “Two-Thirds of Us Are Uncomfortable Talking to Disabled People: We Need Time, Money and Effort to Get over the Awkwardness.” Two-Thirds of Us Are Uncomfortable Talking to Disabled People: We Need Time, Money and Effort to Get over the Awkwardness, 8 May 2014, www.newstatesman.com/voices/2014/05/two-thirds-us-are-uncomfortable-talking-disabled-people-we-need-time-money-and-effort.
