ABSTRACT
The Routledge Companion to Art and Disability explores disability in visual culture to uncover the ways in which bodily and cognitive differences are articulated physically and theoretically, and to demonstrate the ways in which disability is culturally constructed.
This companion is organized thematically and includes artists from across historical periods and cultures in order to demonstrate the ways in which disability is historically and culturally contingent. The book engages with questions such as: How are people with disabilities represented in art? How are notions of disability articulated in relation to ideas of normality, hybridity, and anomaly? How do artists use visual culture to affirm or subvert notions of the normative body? Contributors consider the changing role of disability in visual culture, the place of representations in society, and the ways in which disability studies engages with and critiques intersectional notions of gender, race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality.
This book will be particularly useful for scholars in art history, disability studies, visual culture, and museum studies.
Part 1 Historical and Religious Framings of Art and Disability 1. Valdivia Statuettes and Hybridity in the Americas of 3500–2500 BCE: An Indigenous Critical Disability Perspective 2. Madness in Classical Greek Art 3. Blindness from Antiquity to the Early Modern Era and its Depiction in Art 4. Bodies of Difference: Disability and Otherness in the Twelfth-Century Japanese Yamai no sōshi 5. Disability in Ancient Indian Art and Aesthetic Theory: The Case of Bibhatsa and Bhayanaka Rasas 6. Ability and Disability in the Pictorial Vitae of Beata Fina in Fifteenth-Century San Gimignano 7. Disability, the Body, and Geopolitics: Lam Qua’s Nineteenth-Century Portraits 8. Art History’s Co-Inhabitants: Disabled Artistic Approaches to Indigeneity Part 2 Ableism and Disablism: Constructing Notions of Idealized Bodies 9. The Afflicted Body of Job and the Aesthetic of Wholeness in Gothic Sculpture 10. Able-bodied and Disabled Dwarfs in Italian Renaissance Art and Culture 11. The Broken Body as Devotional Mediator in Seventeenth-Century Spain 12. Charles Lang Freer: Collecting the Disabled Body 13. Exercising "Disciplinary Power": The "Compulsory Visibility" of Lewis Hine’s 1917 Photographs of Laboring-Class Teen Women with Scoliosis 14. Eternal Youth: Fascism, Eugenics, and the Ideal Body at Rockefeller Center’s Palazzo d’Italia 15. Masculinity and Disability in the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial 16. Pieces of Cake Part 3 Towards an Aesthetics of Disability 17. Blinding Sight: Vision and Spectacles in John Haberle’s Trompe l’Oeil Paintings 18. On Not Seeing or Feeling: Embodying Disability in Viennese Modern Art 19. Fragmented Bodies: Ideal Beauty and Deformity in Nineteenth-Century Art and Science 20. The Aesthetics of Prosthetics: From the Premodern Uncanny to the Postmodern Imaginary 21. Introducing Crip Materiality: Mad Objects and Soft Screw 22. Sign Language Music Videos: Language Preservation or Appropriation? 23. Grow Your Brain! Contemporary Art on the Autism Spectrum
