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Subjecting The Unruly Body: Staring, Surveillance, And The Politics Of (In)Visibility
Barnhardt, Carly
Barnhardt, Carly
Abstract
Contemporary feminist disability studies, a field pioneered by scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, offers a framework to reconsider the constructions of normality and deviance, to instead place disability at the center of human experience, rather than relegate it to the margin. As she argues in her foundational essay “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory,” incorporating disability into feminist frameworks has the potential to open up new questions and methods of analysis. Using what Susanna B. Mintz calls the “unruly body” as a subject of analysis, I look for opportunities to read the gendered disabled body “as textually produced but also phenomenologically alive.” In Part I of this portfolio, I address complicated biopolitical questions of individual liberty and public health by interrogating the implications and limitations of adopting a disease model of treatment of both pregnancy and substance use disorders. In Part II, I place visual artist Laura Swanson’s photography series Anti-Self-Portraits within a broader context of American art photography. I argue that Swanson uses the visual rhetoric of the uncanny to comment on the experience of “misfitting,” a term coined by Garland-Thomson in her essay “Misfits: A Feminist Materialist Disability Concept” to describe the ways in which “the environment does not sustain the shape and function of the body that enters it.”
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2023-01-01
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American Studies
DOI
https://dx.doi.org/10.21220/s2-f4yy-7z88