Imaging the Medical Humanities: On Aesthethics & Disability

Laura Ferguson, an artist working in New York City, has put together a phenomenal blog post at the Literature, Arts & Medicine Blog.  I'd like to use it to frame this installment in the Imaging the Medical Humanities series.  She writes,

Can a deformed body be beautiful? Yes, through an artist’s eyes – and I believe art can help medicine to broaden its vision, and embrace a new aesthetic of the body.

I’m an artist and for the past twenty years I’ve been using my own body, inside and out, as the subject of my work. My anatomy is an unusual one because of scoliosis, a curvature of the spine, and I found intriguing visual possibilities in the image of a body that was beautiful yet flawed. My drawings are quite intimate and personal, and at the same time strongly based on science, on an understanding of anatomy and physiology, and specifically on medical images of my own skeleton that were made for this purpose.

She notes that while many doctors have commented on the beauty of her portraits and the insight it provides, "almost all the orthopedists who tell me they love my work also try to convince me I should have more surgery – whether or not I’ve asked them for medical advice. Ultimately, it seems they can’t help but see an unusual anatomy as a problem to be fixed."

This is a key problem with the medical model of disability, that it sees difference as abnormal, as something that requires fixing.  This has a number of deleterious effects, not least of which is that it attaches notions of deviance to difference.  Many disabled persons internalize this construction; as I have noted before, I can only begin to imagine the suffering of a person who " has constantly been told that they are, in essence, less than what they should be, that they are less than whole, somehow incomplete, inferior to others who do not have the impairment(s) at issue." 

The construction of disabled identity as a lack, as dysfunction, has also had grave social consequences.  Because disabled persons' bodies have traditionally been assessed in terms of this lack, this deviance, they have been ripe for exploitation in unethical human subjects research.  Goodman et al.'s notion of human subjects research being a means of rendering un-useful bodies useful to the state is relevant in explaining further how the medical model of disability has been turned to dark ends.  The extremely popular eugenics movement of the early 20th century is intimately connected to this frame, as well as being another manifestation of overt reliance on a conception of disability as deviance.

I wholeheartedly agree with Ferguson that "art is a good place to look for an alternative aesthetic," one that explores the ambiguities of bodies and the possibilities of a conception of difference without a necessary connection to deviance.  While there are many wonderful disability artists, I am continually moved by Riva Lehrer's art, such as this:

This painting is # 9 in Lehrer's Circle Stories collection.  She is Rebecca Maskos, a disability scholar and activist, who was a Fulbright scholar at UIC when this portrait was completed in 2001.  Lehrer, who was awarded the inagurual Wynn Newhouse Award earlier this year, weaves compelling stories in her paintings, but eschews reliance on traditionally medical themes of loss and suffering in her art.  I particularly like Lehrer's work because there is a realist element to much of it; the figures' impairments are not hidden or minimized.  We are, after all, embodied creatures.  Yet, the traditional, almost reflexive equations of impairment with dysfunction and deviance are absent in Lehrer's work.

Thoughts?

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Bibliography

Paul K. Longmore, Lauri Umansky, eds., The New Disability History: American Perspectives (New York: New York University Press, 2001).

Petra Kuppers, Scar of Visibility: Medical Performances and Contemporary Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).

Carrie Sandahl, Philip Auslander, eds., Bodies in Commotion: Disability & Performance (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2005).

Martin S. Pernick, The Black Stork: Eugenics and the Death of Defective Babies in American Medicine and Motion Pictures Since 1915 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

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