K.4.1 Peyththai and Image-Making: Cripping Chronic Pain the Tamil Way

• Vyshali Manivannan, Pace University

Fibromyalgia (FMS) and myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), syndromes of widespread chronic pain and persistent malaise worsened by exertion, are non-apparent disabilities that slide in and out of visibility. Stafford (1993) reminds us that “the many experiences of art make visible the countless ways that have existed for apprehending, feeling, and reconstructing the three-dimensional world” (p. 477), that a drawing or photograph “is a historical record of what its creator noticed and considered worth noticing within a given culture at a particular moment” (p. 477). What do modern imaging scans, synecdochical and allegedly objective, suggest we notice or consider worth noticing about chronically ill nonwhite women’s bodies today? And how might nonwhite women use visual art to challenge dominant understandings of chronic pain? Scarry (1985) has famously argued that pain is interior, subjective, and unshareable, and given the ocularcentric nature of Euro-Western society and modern medicine, chronically pained patients in particular habituate the need to document and archive their bodily processes, in case the need for proof arises. As an Eelam Tamil American with FMS and ME, I build on the assertions of Padfield (2011, 2018, 2020), Semino (2010), and Williams (2020) to suggest that images produced by and on the disabled Eelam Tamil bodymind enhance communication about pain and influence how the chronically pained body is perceived by drawing on aesthetic codes that already center difference. For instance, non-normative bodies we might deem disabled—like Karna, Ravana, or Ashtavakra—are represented as venerated figures in South Asian art. Furthermore, body modifications like piercings, tattoos, and scarifications on brown skin may visually evoke distinct non-Western biocultural influences and aesthetic codes as well as signifying pain tolerance. Thus, the non-apparently disabled body may cunningly visually “misfit” (Garland-Thomson, 2011) in other ways, presenting specific instances of enduring pain and inviting communication about that pain—and, necessarily, chronic pain. The tactile quality of body modifications and visual art also lend themselves to alternative sensory hierarchies that destabilize vision as the default dominant modality.

In this autoethnographic presentation, I examine visual culture around the bodily interior and exterior in the form of imaging scans and body modifications of/on the fibromyalgic Tamil body. I will explore how meanings are made around a queer Eelam Tamil fibromyalgic woman scholar’s bodymind—via image-making by biomedical technologies and artists commissioned by the disabled patient herself—to excavate broader cultural relationships between chronic pain, ocularcentrism and the Tamil sensory hierarchy, cunning intelligence, and decolonial ways of knowing. Chronic pain is best approached bioculturally and non-stereotypically (Morris, 2000), and visual art on and around the chronically pained body—such as body modifications, selfies, and illustrations of intensity and chronicity—have the potential to crip the disabled/nondisabled binary itself. Patient-produced images and commissioned body art simultaneously preserve and alter the meanings of chronic pain in a given moment, and in visually recasting its avatars, permit new meanings to emerge.

K.4.2 Disability, Gender, and Othering in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and It's Book Illustrations

• Dean Leetal, Kibbutzim College

Frankenstein's monster has been notoriously misrepresented in art for decades. Most famously, perhaps, by Boris Karloff, in James Wales' iconic 1931 movie. In her original text, Mary Shelley described the monster as beautiful, if horrific -having long black hair, glowing eyes, and nearly translucent skin. However, illustrations of the monster rarely reflect this description. Their variety is incredibly wide, reflecting different understandings of disability and of gender. In her well known paper, Susan Stryker (1994; 2019) discusses the monster as being transgender, and transgender people owning the derogatory mantle of monster. In a similar switch of perspectives, Homi K Bhabha (2019) reframes "barbarians" as the vicious guards at the gate of "normative society," keeping immigrants out. Hil Malatino (2019) takes this mantle of monstrosity pride into discussion of community trans care. This paper explores different understandings of monstrosity, disability and gender—through different illustrations made for the novel.

K.4.3 Cripping Self-Portraiture: The Artwork of Ann Millett-Gallant

• Ann Millett-Gallant, UNC Greensboro

Self-portraiture has a storied and maligned history of serving as shameless displays of artists’ chosen economic, political, and social statuses, assertions of themselves as creative and metaphorical “geniuses,” and evidence of a proclivity for introverted moments of self-contemplation. For women and other objectified and marginalized subjects, indulging in self-absorption and -representation risks accusations of narcissism, vanity, and aloofness, long before the twenty-first century COVID-19 pandemic and quarantine. If contemporary self-portraits of disabled women frame isolation, yet also spotlight self-awareness, are they narcissistic, self-serving evidence of their subjects imposed social distancing and/or testament to their independence and resourcefulness? Do they resonate with broader inquiries regarding whose bodies are seen, or recognized? Can such works envision and evoke “crip” pride and assert self- crafted, disabled body images? My contemporary self-portraiture acts are multifaceted and multi-genre. They envision a woman, Art Historian, Disability Studies scholar, visual artist, congenital amputee, and survivor of Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) through corporeal imagery and abstraction. Memoirs, speeches, books, and images of personal and body experiences have fueled feminist and disability rights political movements and “liberation.” Through these veins, the visual self-portraits presented here embody my varied bodymind experiences, losses, and transforming body images. Creating visual reminders about my mind and body’s amusements and trauma following TBI helped me conceptualize my experiences in tangible, artistic forms.

These self-portraits document scars, facial expressions, and various corporeal body parts in poses that project “Cripexpressionist” body images and actions in saturated, vivid color and conceptual forms. I will draw comparisons with “self-portrait” images, or glimpses, of the artists’ crip presence and perspectives in works by disabled women artists such as Frida Kahlo, Chun-Shan (Sandie) Yi, and Laura Swanson. In these frames, my works materialize and stage my “crip,” asymmetrical physique as an active agent, celebrating difference/otherness or “Cripness” by performing disability pride, irreverent humor, light-heartedness, and interactions with cat companions.

K.4.4 Gallery as Hospital, Hospital as Gallery

• Albert Stabler, Illinois State University

A great many disabled artists have used imagery or literal examples of medical or medical-adjacent technology in their works, invoking and evoking a range of significations, connotations, and effects. In turn, the antiseptic anti-aesthetic of the hospital has resonated in various ways with the equally blank and institutional but highly aestheticized space of the modern and/or contemporary gallery or museum. In implicitly or explicitly linking the hospital and the gallery, work by disabled artists participates in the tradition of institutional critique in a manner that has meaningful but underexplored connotations that touch on ideas of embodiment, display, imperfection, and control. Among the many contemporary disabled artists who have capitalized on these resonances are Panteha Abareshi, Carolyn Lazard. Karrie Higgins, Jesse Darling, Berenice Olmedo, Carly Mandel, Christopher Samuel, and Constantina Zavitsanos.

In my presentation I will consider work by these artists in relation to the context of “disability aesthetics” described by Tobin Siebers,, as well as in relation to the profound influence of institutional aesthetics in modernist architecture. My intention is to consider how both medical and aesthetic spaces attempt to analyze and alter non-typical bodies and minds, while implicitly delectating and fetishizing them, and meanwhile, effectively excluding them from consideration in social, economic, and cultural spheres. Disabled artists, in a range of ways, undertake a penetrating critique of repressive operations by which disability is studiously hidden while remaining ubiquitous in the visual landscape and ideological sensibilities of industrialized modernity.