Cognitive Disability Aesthetics: Visual Culture, Disability Representations, and the (In)Visibility of Cognitive Difference PDF
Preview Cognitive Disability Aesthetics: Visual Culture, Disability Representations, and the (In)Visibility of Cognitive Difference
COGNITIVE DISABILITY AESTHETICS Visual Culture, Disability Representations, and the (In)Visibility of Cognitive Difference This page intentionally left blank COGNITIVE DISABILITY AESTHETICS Visual Culture, Disability This page intentionally left blank Representations, and the (In)Visibility of Cognitive Difference BENJAMIN FRASER UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London © University of Toronto Press 2018 Toronto Buffalo London utorontopress.com Printed in the U.S.A. ISBN 978-1-4875-0233-1 Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks. Toronto Iberic Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Fraser, Benjamin, author Cognitive disability aesthetics : visual culture, disability representations, and the (in)visibility of cognitive difference / Benjamin Fraser. (Toronto Iberic ; 32) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4875-0233-1 (cloth) 1. Disability studies. 2. Aesthetics. 3. Cognition disorders − Social aspects − Spain. 4. Popular culture − Spain. 5. Arts − Spain. I. Title. II. Series: Toronto Iberic ; 32 HV1568.2.F73 2018 704.9'496168 C2017-906090-2 This book has been published with the assistance of the Thomas Harriot College of Arts and Sciences at East Carolina University. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario. Funded by the Financé par le Government gouvernement of Canada du Canada For Ben, Abby, and Judd Contents Preface ix Introduction 3 Part One: Theorizing Visual Disability Representations 1 On the (In)Visibility of Cognitive Disability 29 2 Signification and Staring: Icon, Index, and Symbol in Visual Media 49 3 Disability Scholarship at the Seam: The Materiality of Visual Narrative 73 Part Two: Cognition, Collaboration, Community 4 Visualizing Down Syndrome and Autism: The Trazos Singulares (Singular Strokes) (2011) Exhibition and María cumple 20 años (María Turns Twenty) (2015) 97 5 Sequencing Alzheimer’s Dementia: Paco Roca’s Graphic Novel Arrugas (Wrinkles) (2008) 136 6 Screening Schizophrenia: Documentary Cinema, Cognitive Disability, and Abel García Roure’s Una cierta verdad (A Certain Truth) (2008) 170 Conclusion 199 viii Contents Notes 205 References 237 Index 259 Preface Three book-length publications are arguably the foundational contri- butions to the study of physical disability representations in the aes- thetic realm: Martin Norden’s Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical Disabilities in the Movies (1994), which traces the centrality of disabled characters in one hundred years of American film; David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s innovative and foundational Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (2000), which privileges the nuances of literary disability representation; and Tobin Siebers’s Disability Aesthetics (2010), which brought a similarly innovative thesis to bear on visual art forms, prioritizing painting and sculpture. Norden writes that “the history of physical disability images in the movies has mostly been a history of distortion in the name of maintaining an able- ist society” (1994: 314). Mitchell and Snyder’s book “argues that images of disabled people abound in history” (2000: 52) and that “once a reader begins to seek out representations of disability in our literatures, it is difficult to avoid their proliferation in texts with which one believed oneself to be utterly familiar” (2000: 52). Siebers’s argument asserts that in painting and sculpture, the presence of disability is the element that has allowed “the beauty of an artwork to endure over time” (2010: 5). The representation of disability is, each text argues in its own way, thus central to the aesthetic histories of these directions in human cultural production. Often under-acknowledged as such in both literary and visual art, physical disability has long been clothed in the normative trappings of an able-bodied society and mobilized to suit a range of symbolic, metaphorical, and perhaps even purportedly transcendent artistic purposes.
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