ENG 374 - Picturing Disability

Why does the visual representation of disability matter? What does it do in the world?

In this disability studies course, we will consider the ways in which picturing disability helps us do several things: expose and challenge stereotype; understand how disabled or ill bodies have been used to create cultural meanings; better understand the cultural, embodied, and lived experience of disability; underscore the way race, disability, sexuality, and gender are intersectional identities; reconsider disability in the medical context; and recognize the creativity and innovation emerging from human variation. 

Thus considering disability representation generates question upon question, many of which we will address: what are the ethics of picturing disability, and how can we circumvent hackneyed spectacle or voyeurism even as we take advantage of the “visual activism” picturing disability allows? How do we make typically invisible impairments like anxiety or depression visible? How do we show the reality of pain without reinforcing the sense that disability is only a tragic or isolating existence? How do we create visual representations that retort against tropes so familiar that we may not even realize we are using them to shape our personal definitions of disability? How can access become part of a disability aesthetic? What does it mean to make art and curate work from a disability justice perspective?

In this course, we’ll look at a wide-ranging assortment of ways disability has been pictured in society. This will include film and television, painting and sculpture, zines and graphic novels; it will also include material objects like disability toys and adaptive devices and clothing. We will read authors who have considered the question of disability representation carefully. You will create your own representation of disability, and we will work together to curate some disability representations.

This course presumes no prior coursework in English or disability studies, and is open to students of all levels. I welcome those from all majors interested in studying the representation of disability as a way to inform their own work in the arts and sciences.

Satisfies a requirement in the Communication Studies interdisciplinary major and minor.
Satisfies the Literary, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.
Satisfies the Diversity requirement in the English major.
Satisfies the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.