RACAR: Journal of the Universities Art Association of Canada (Web)

Proposals: 01.02.2023

“Cripping Visual Cultures” honors the legacy of the late Tobin Siebers’ field-altering Disability Aesthetics (2010) by mining disability’s unremarked centrality to art history and visual culture studies’ methods and systems of valuation. With its crucial turn to conceiving disability as not merely a matter of representation, biography, or biology but also and especially as a style, an aesthetic, and a political tactic, Siebers exposed the previously unacknowledged and yet pivotal role of disability: “disability is properly speaking an aesthetic value, which is to say, it participates in a system of knowledge that provides materials for and increases critical consciousness about the way that some bodies make other bodies feel.”[i]
This special issue is dedicated to confronting the promise but also the pitfalls of what it means to crip visual cultures. The editors start with the proposition that failing to attend to the politics of disability leaves unrecognized the foundational ways that the art world and its histories are medicalized. Given the propensity toward “inspiration porn” in rhetoric about disabled people, they also consider the potential of an antisocial turn, initiated by queer and feminist disabled activists and scholars in cripped art history and cripped visual cultures, that embraces the negative, minor, and un-celebratory. Further, the editors understand “crip” as an analytic mode that broadens the critical relevance of disability studies’ inquiry beyond the limiting frame of what is or is not traditionally defined as the proper subject of disability. They hope this special issue will provide an opportunity to take up the difficulty of reconciling an anti-identitarian politics of “crip” at a time when disabled lives are still undervalued not only in everyday life but also in the academy. Additionally, the editors explore the possibility of collectively reimagining how art objects, art practices, and art institutions can and do produce, challenge, perform, and promote the vertiginous possibilities of “cripping visual cultures” through … read more (Web)

Editors: Lucienne D. Auz (Univ. of Memphis), Patricia Bérubé (Carleton Univ.), Jessica A. Cooley (Univ. of Minnesota), Sarah Heussaff (Univ. du Québec), and Stefanie Snider (Independent Scholar)

Source: Qstudy-l