Please enable JavaScript.
Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.
Tobin Siebers - Disability Aesthetics - Coggle Diagram
Tobin Siebers - Disability Aesthetics
What is the problem Siebers is thinking about?
what are "aesthetics"?
"how some bodies make other bodies feel"
disability has always been part of art history
expands our idea of being alive on this planet
what are "disability aesthetics"?
"Disability aesthetics refuses to recognize the representation of the healthy body--and its definition of harmony, integrity, and beauty--as the sole determination of the aesthetic" (3)
"Rather, disability aesthetics embraces beauty that seems by traditional standards to be broken, and it is not less beautiful" (3)
GOALS
1) "establish disability as a critical framework" -- develop methods for understanding and appreciate art and art history
as disabled
2) "to elaborate disability as an aesthetic value in itself worthy of future development" -- disability has been here, so what if we center it and use it as a way to make new art? understand new art?
develop new adaptive art spaces
Disqualification:
"symbolic process removes individuals from the ranks of quality human beings, putting them at risk of unequal treatment, bodily harm, and death" (23) historically, when you "other"
"disqualifies as inferior and naturalizes their oppression" (24)
Archive
Nazis and 3rd Reich
state propaganda and coercive to national bodies
Great German Art Exhibition: "siezed with admiration for stregnth and beauty and therefore for what is healthy and vigorous"
taking propaganda of "health" to its hyper masculinist ends
the jump from bodies to landscapes
"Degenerate Art"
modernist art (assymetry), so distinctly against the hyper-symmetry of Nazi bodies
naturalizes degeneracy and asymmetry and unsound minds
"the evils of miscegenation" and reproduction (36)
Allison Lapper Pregnant
"denying the statue as art" (42)
"women were deemed inferior" (24)
Medical photography (pg 44)
the Mutter Museum "disturbingly informative" -- the spectacle and of course that objectification
the value of knowledge production around physical difference; looking at these
"promote a healthy world" (45);
a note on methodology (Siebers, take note of Erevelles and Minear's deliberate naming system);
What would a disability aesthetics look like without disqualification?
"Disability aesthetics prizes physical and mental difference as a significant value in itself. It does not embrace aesthetic taste that defines harmony, bodily integrity, and health as standards of beauty" (19). see Mcartny's performance art,