The Disabled Gaze MultiSensory Perspectives on Art, Bodies, and Objects

How does being disabled change the ways people experience the world and the things they create? This agenda-setting collection brings material, visual, artistic, and literary perspectives together to examine how disabled people have shaped representations of themselves in images, objects, and literature. Engaging with themes of cripping, resistance, and rethinking, the chapters unpack the creative, generative, and transformative approaches by which disabled people have aimed to capture power by controlling how they are perceived. Collectively the volume introduces the “disabled gaze”—an autonomous claiming of identity that disabled people use through making—as a guard against and redressing of ableism and stigma. The essays present a range of highly-illustrated case studies that center disabled people’s broader material worlds and resituate artefacts of all sorts, not just specialized design objects, as incubators for disability justice. These range from 19th-century ceramics depicting the British Sign Language manual alphabet, Claud Monet’s cataracts and their impact on his painting of the Water Lilies series, and the confraternities of artists with disabilities in early-modern Venice. Positioning the disabled gaze as both a theoretical model and an investigative lens, the collection affirms disabled people as subjects and the power of their gazes as they claim and assert their own performances, identity, and citizenship. Cutting edge in its interdisciplinary approach, the volume moves beyond the disabled gaze as a tactic limited to visual or optical acts of perception, with authors considering how the disabled gaze can be enacted through acts of touch—the “graze”—or even sound. Across the volume, disability itself comes to encompass multiple acts of making, shaping, sensing, and perceiving, and provides a vital perspective on how subjectivity is created through visual and material artefacts.