disability studies and art education

DISABILITY STUDIES AND ART EDUCATION John Derby / The University of Kansas / © 2011. Used with permission of the National Art Education Association.

Derby, J. (2011). Disability studies and art education. Studies in Art Education, 52, 94–111.

Disability Studies and Art Education

John Derby

The University of Kansas

Abstract

This article promotes the field of disability studies as a valuable resource for expanding art

education’s concept of disability and as a promising venue for interdisciplinary dialogue. While

art education has persistently supported special education since its inception, disability advocacy

has advanced in the past two decades toward self-awareness, self-reliance, and self-expression.

The article demonstrates how disability studies, as the academic manifestation of this trend, can

critically elaborate disability discourses in art education, such as those which espouse special

education and the uncritical use of pejorative disability metaphors. The article concludes by

exploring possibilities for art education researchers to contribute to disability studies and to

collaborate on research as an interdisciplinary project to advance both fields.

Contexts for Investing in Disability Studies

In a recent National Art Education Association (NAEA) News column, Eisenhauer

(2008b) invited socially-minded art educators to consider disability as a unique and important

part of the field’s agenda and to include disability studies within its scholarly parameters.

Eisenhauer (2008a, 2008b) acknowledges the importance of art education’s longstanding social

justice theory and advocacy tradition, but recognizes that disability—among the most widely and

severely oppressed human conditions (Charlton, 2006)—has been excluded from that tradition.

Despite Blandy’s (1991) call for a sociopolitical orientation of disability two decades ago, and

the flourishing of disability theory and activism that supports Blandy’s position, the field

continues to resemble orthodox special education discourses that largely ignore the first-hand

perspectives of disabled students, teachers, researchers, artists, and others.

This article accepts Eisenhauer’s (2008b) invitation, explaining why and how art

educators should merge social justice and disability research traditions by participating in the

interdisciplinary scholarship of disability studies. Such a project is already underway in general

education, as evidenced by publication trends and the efforts of American Educational Research

Association special interest group #143, “Disability Studies in Education.” Interdisciplinary

research has entertained the intersection of visual culture and disability studies; for instance, in a

special “Visuality–Disability” themed issue of the Journal of Visual Culture (Davis & Smith,

2006a), which draws from humanities, social science, and fine arts disciplines (Davis & Smith,

2006b). Disability studies is adjacent to other critical fields such as cultural studies, literary

theory, queer theory, gender studies, and critical race studies (Siebers, 2008) with “intellectual

roots in the social sciences, humanities, and rehabilitation sciences” (Albrecht, Seelman, & Bury,

2001, p. 2). Like visual culture studies, disability studies “attends to the practices of teaching and

learning and focuses on lived experiences with the intention to disrupt, contest, and transform

systems of oppression” (Tavin, 2003, p. 198). Specifically, disability studies recognizes

disability as a matter of complex embodiment (Siebers, 2008)—the intersection of cultural


minority identity with embodied experience of impairment—amidst the crisis of ableism, which

is akin to racism (Brown, 2001). Disability studies scholars span the literary, performing, and

visual arts, and the field’s prominent journals promote creative expression (Derby, 2010).

After briefly reviewing art education’s historic attention to disability, I discuss disability

studies research that can inform art education, discursively, performatively, and aesthetically. I

then critically apply disability theory to specific problematic art education discourses. I conclude

by recommending changes in art education policies and practices, and I discuss implications for

future interdisciplinary research.

Historic Contexts of Art Education Research on Disability

Art education literature has been interested in disability since the 1930s (Blandy, 1991).

Until the mid-1970s, when disability became associated with the civil rights movement, this

literature followed contemporaneous trends of the field identified by Efland (1990). It was

generally presumed during this period that art education for disabled students was a remedial

effort suitable for building self-esteem and for rehabilitation. Blandy (1991), citing Gilman, links

this mindset to the nineteenth century utilization of art as “a recognized diagnostic tool for

determining nonfunctionality and psychopathology” (p. 134). The tradition of visualizing

insanity and deformity survives in the medical model (Blandy, 1989b) of disability, in which

disability is regarded as a problem necessitating therapeutic attention from nondisabled

professionals, framed inside the doctor-patient (Foucault, 1965/1988) relationship.

Within U.S. education, the medical model was pedagogically crystallized in the landmark

Congressional legislation PL 92-142, the “Education for All Handicapped Children Act” (1975).

Currently, this law has been revised as the “Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement

Act of 2004” (IDEA, 2004) which grew out of parental and legislative advocacy. PL 92-142

legally mandated special education for nearly all disabled young people (United States

Department of Education (USDE), n.d.) and instituted the mainstreaming movement; art

educators were among the first, historically, to welcome disabled students into general

classrooms (Gerber, 1994; Guay, 1994b; Schiller, 1999; Wexler, 2005). Art education literature

reflects the IDEA and special education’s monopolization of the education of disabled children

in public schools. NAEA’s current bestselling book (personal communication with NAEA,

August 18, 2009), Reaching and Teaching Students with Special Needs through Art (Gerber &

Guay, 2006), and NAEA’s formally recognized interest group, “Special Needs in Art Education”

(SNAE),1 are firmly aligned with the IDEA and special education discourses. In practical terms,

Blandy, Pancsofar, and Mokensturm (1988) criticize art education’s affiliation with special

education aims as art learning standards are often squelched by objectives regarding medical

rehabilitation and peer socialization. Moreover, Blandy (1989b) suggests that the categorization

of disability in PL-142, which persists in subsequent IDEA revisions, “may be spuriously

founded” (Blandy, 1989b, p. 9). He also questions the usefulness of this legislation in

educational contexts because of its propensity to “promote popular and professional stereotypes”

(p. 9) about disabled people, which propagates stigma and confuses teachers. The implication of

the medical model for schools is that disabled learners are positioned as helpless dependents

requiring unusual services from nondisabled educators, paraprofessionals, and peers.

Blandy’s call for a sociopolitical orientation of disability (1991) and related research

(Blandy, 1989a, 1989b, 1993, 1994, 1999; Blandy, Branen, Congdon, & Muschlitz, 1992;

Blandy, Panscofar, & Mockensturm, 1988) mirrors the second major landmark legislation for

disabled people, the “Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990” (ADA, 1993), which mandated


“reasonable accommodations” in public and in the workplace. The passage of the ADA marks a

cultural shift toward understanding disability in terms of social justice and diversity, noting that

disability is not an inherently biological condition, but a result of disabling environments. For

example, wheelchair users live typical lives, except where they encounter obstructive

technologies including buildings, transportation vehicles, walkways, high shelving, and so on.

Human design, not biometric disposition, determines accessibility.

The conceptual shift of the ADA (1993) and the research of Blandy and colleagues is

sporadically apparent in art education scholarship that critically extends the conception of

disability beyond special education settings, calling for an increase in disability awareness

(Blandy, 1989b, 1991, 1994, 1999; Eisenhauer, 2008b; Loesl, 1999, Wexler, 2009), better

teacher education (Blandy, 1994; Guay, 1994a, 1994b), environmental changes that address

ableism (Andrus, 1994; Arnold, 1999; Blandy 1989a, 1989b, 1991, 1993, 1999; Blandy et al.,

1988; Guay, 1993, 1994b, 1995, 1999; Schiller, 1999; Wexler, 2005), and sociopolitical

pedagogy and activism (Blandy, 1989a, 1989b, 1991, 1994, 1999; Eisenhauer, 2007, 2008a,

2008b). However, Eisenhauer (2007) has pointed out that art education continues to promote “a

language of inclusion, accommodation, mainstreaming, and therapy” (p. 7), in other words,

orthodox special education discourses which includes art therapy (American Art Therapy

Association (AATA), 2009, Burnette & Lokerson, 2006). Such discourses have fallen behind the

progression of disability activism, espoused by Blandy and colleagues, which has evolved into

the established field (Davis, 2006c) of disability studies.

Disability Studies Illuminations for Art Education

Disability studies can advance the field of art education’s perspectives and policies about

disability. The thrust of disability studies emerges from the disability community (see Davis,

1997) unlike IDEA (2004) and orthodox special education whose constituency has been mainly

non-disabled parents and education professionals (Danforth, 2009; Osgood, 2008). Disability

studies recognizes disabled people or people with disabilities2 as a social or cultural category

(Goodley & Rapley, 2002; Linton, 1998/2006) with a minority identity (Siebers, 2008), whose

communal locus is not corporeal similitude but the shared embodied experience of navigating a

world whose design produces barriers to people with certain attributes. “Visible” disabling

barriers such as inaccessible architecture and curricula are not the extent of ableism, but merely,

indicators of a deep aesthetic anxiety (Blandy, 1991; Duncum & Springgay, 2007) and social

ambivalence about disabled people as pathetic and threatening freaks (Chivers, 2001; Thomson,

1997; Markotic, 2001; Hevey, 1992/2006). Part of this anxiety is because, unlike most minority

identities, everyone is constantly “at risk” of becoming disabled. Although disability is not

contagious, it is commonly pathologized as such in our imagination; for instance, in the imagined

horror (Chivers, 2001) of “losing” one’s legs, sight, or mind.

Discursivity of (Pathologized) Disabled Bodies

This “horror” of disability and its pathologization are neither natural nor decisive; rather,

they are discursive constructions rooted in visual and linguistic myths. Throughout his career,

Foucault (1971/1972, 1965/1988, 1964/1995, 1999/2003, 1962/2008a, 2003/2008b) critiqued

psychiatry as an institutional discourse that pathologized people with mental illness as irrational,

therefore incapable of productivity, and therefore subhuman. Psychiatry emerged from

nineteenth century idealism, which regarded reason as the defining characteristic of humanness,

establishing the power relationship of doctor-patient according to a sane/insane binary. However,


the doctor of psychiatry was not strictly a scientist or medical practitioner but a multifaceted

persona as moralist, sage, showman, and magician (Foucault, 1965/1988). Foucault (1965/1988)

challenges that this collusion of scientific rationalism and mysticism persisted in modernism, as

evidenced by the modern myth of the mad, artistic genius. The widespread acceptance of the

“mad art” of Nietzsche, Van Gogh, and others Foucault discusses implicates the ableist notion of

a sane/insane binary. Foucault (1965/1988) recognizes that we cannot decisively identify a point

in Nietzsche’s work where genius gives way to or becomes insanity. Foucault’s recognition of

“madness” in art indicates that mental illness is not unproductive or counterproductive, but

rather, a diverse kind of productivity that is often misunderstood, a neurodiversity.

Through an analysis of obsession in Outsider Art, disability studies scholar Davis

(2006b) complements Foucault’s critical work on mental illness discourses. Davis discusses

historic artists whose professional careers were elevated because of obsessive art practices or

themes in their work as another example of genius-madness narratives in art. According to

Davis, this phenomenon prompts a biocultural explanation of disease:

When it comes to obsession, I am first interested in the way a mode of inquiry...or a set of

behaviors, call them ‘repetition, checking, tallying, ordering, stacking, categorizing, or

arranging’, move over from, say, uncommon to somewhat common traits to be defined as

illness. (p. 244)

Davis alludes to the many “diseases” or “disabilities” that have come and gone over time;

for example, such characteristics as skin appearances, height, eye color, body weight, and

various mental illnesses have been regarded as illness and not-illness at different times. Whereas

Foucault (1965/1988, 1962/2008) critiques the moralistic and gendered undercurrents of specific,

historic mental illnesses such as hysteria and melancholy, Davis notes that all illness “emerges

from different cultures at different times and is more of a cultural representation of physical,

cognitive, or affective states than it is a bottom-line description of a verifiable object” (p. 243).

Thus, disability is a discursive social construction by which certain attributes are noticed and

categorized as commonly deviant instead of, simply, as common.

Another important aspect of Davis’ (2006b) discussion is his emphasis on embodiment in

discourses of obsessive artists. Criticizing the trend in art history to disavow the artist-as-subject

in favor of “social and institutional structures,” Davis argues that, “it is a serious mistake in art

history, or any history, to omit the category of embodiedness” (p. 246), since both object and

subject are conflated in discursive frameworks. Specifically, Davis recognizes that the labeling

and institutionalization of obsessed artists had (and, likewise, has) a measurable impact on their

mental state, and hence, their creative output. Furthermore, the art world’s obsession with

obsessed artists3 has more to do with the workings of artists’ minds and practices than their

works.

Thus, Davis’s attention to the embodied experience of obsessed artists as a locus of

interest in mad-genius discourses—which could include Foucault, who himself was treated for

serious mental illness during graduate studies (Eribon, 1991; Macey, 1993; Miller,

1993)—ultimately provides not an image of the disabled body par excellence, but rather, a

prototypical image of the discursive disabled body. Mental illness, while often omitted from

disability discussions, sufficiently represents disabled bodies (assuming the mind is part of the

body) as a biocultural construction; its forms are disparate and in constant flux according to

evolving cultural contexts, and its pathologization is systematically ascribed to the province of

medicine (Davis, 2006b, Foucault 1965/1988, Gilman, 1982) and the doctor-patient relationship

(Foucault, 1965/1988).


Disability Performance and Productivity

While Foucault (1965/1988) regards the artifacts of “mad art” as meritorious, and Davis

(2006b) values the embodiment of mental illness by artists, Hughes and Paterson (1997) connect

these aspects, arguing that all disability is recognized as “a product of discursive practices[,]...an

effect, rather than an origin, a performance rather than an essence” (p. 333). Because disability is

performative, many disabled artists choose to express themselves through the performing arts

and performance art as Eisenhauer (2007) has discussed. Disability studies literature routinely

reconstructs performative art through critical writing (Crutchfield & Epstein, 2000; Kuppers,

2000, 2003, 2005, 2007; Sandahl & Auslander, 2005), but it also addresses everyday

performance as important. For example, paraplegic NPR journalist Hockenberry (2008) recounts

a project (not intended as art) in which, strapped with a concealed microphone and tape recorder,

he drags his wheelchair up and down stairs of the New York subway system in order to discover

how environmental and social barriers coincide. Hockenberry does not experience the scorn,

ridicule, and appall we might expect; rather, he finds that White people completely ignore him

while people who are not White frequently try to help him. Through this experiment,

Hockenberry (who is White) speculates that race and disability are “deeply related” (p. 259).4

Lewiecki-Wilson and Brueggemann (2008), editors of Disability and the Teaching of

Writing, offer two pedagogical activities in response to Hockenberry’s essay that could be

adapted and enhanced through art education. They suggest, first, that students could document

environmental accessibility at school sites by locating and navigating “handicapped” entrances

and routes and interviewing subjects who regularly use them. I suggest these activities could

elicit further response in such diverse art forms as documentary film, graphic novels and comics,

installation, video art, traditional art such as drawing and painting, and performing arts as well as

critical discussions and written responses to historic (written and visual) research. By combining

art, particularly collaborative tasks, and writing, such projects could encourage students to

consider the ways in which disability is socially constructed and to recognize the public social

connection between disabled and nondisabled people.

Second, Lewiecki-Wilson and Brueggemann (2008) suggest students could map public

transit routes and consider how they are accessible and inaccessible. This task provides an

interesting design problem as students must conceptualize space in terms of different modes of

navigation and consider how to represent these modes in visual and multisensory maps. It would

also be interesting to entertain relevant art projects, including the Situationist International

movement and the evolution of Guy Debord’s concepts of détournement and psychogeography

(kanarinka, 2006), in which urban wandering intermingles theory and cartography. While

physical impairment and mobility devices present an obvious contention about architectural

accessibility, other kinds of disability, including invisible disabilities, support the notion that

disability as a concept or lens can serve as a foundation for critical inquiry of the ableist

implications of institutional spaces. My own artwork provides an example of such inquiry: I

critically re-worked several maps of the Ohio State University campus, including a map titled

“Finding Your Way to Harding Hospital” (Figure 1), which provides directions to the

University’s psychiatric hospital. My project, titled Finding My Way to Harding Hospital (Figure

2), reinvents the map from the perspective of one who was involuntarily committed, whose

“way” to the Hospital had little to do with the literal language of the original map.


Figure 1. Finding your way to Harding Hospital [digital map] by The Ohio State University

Medical Center, July 27, 2007. Copyright 2007 by the Ohio State University Medical Center.


Figure 2. Finding my way to Harding Hospital [digital image] by J. Derby, 2007–2009.


Aesthetics and Disabled Bodies

Underlying performativity, ableist concepts of body competency are deeply entrenched in

what Darts (2008) calls the “visual culture wars,” in which morality and beauty ideals are

proposed as justification for censoring representations of “disorderly bodies” (Duncum &

Springgay, 2007). Siebers’ (2003) exploration of disability as part of the culture wars

significantly adds to Darts’ (2008) discussion and to the broad, recent critical dialogue in art

education about aesthetics (Barrett, 2007, Bresler, 2006; Carter, 2008, 2009; Duncum, 2007,

2008; Efland, 2007; Gude, 2008; jagodzinski, 2009; Peters, 2007; Tavin, 2007, 2008). Siebers

(2003) proposes that the culture wars, which result in the naming of what should be included and

excluded in culture, are waged according to “statements that label cultural attitudes, minority

groups, lifestyles, and works of art as ‘healthy’ or ‘sick’ [which] are not metaphors but aesthetic

judgments about the physical and mental condition of citizens” (p. 182). Disability (and other

forms of “deviant” appearance and behavior) is judged sick, and is culturally quarantined

through such means as the construction of architectural barriers, censorship of art and other

visual culture (such as restricting images of disabled people from mainstream films and

advertisement5), and even law enforcement efforts that banish “undesirables” (such as homeless

people with mental illnesses) from the public eye (Siebers, 2003).

Similar exclusions are routinely instituted in public schools (Siebers, 2003). Visibility

and voice are permitted for some and denied for others, namely minorities, including disabled

learners. The lack of attention to self-representation of disability in art education exemplifies

what Eisner (in Darts, 2008) refers to as “null curriculum,” and that, “what schools don’t teach

can be as important as what they do teach” (p. 113). Disability is rarely acknowledged as a

cultural category in art education as evidenced by its absence in such major surveys of the field

on social issues (Milbrandt, 2002), curricular concerns (La Porte, Speirs, & Young, 2008), and

the sparse attention to disability as culture in NAEA convention presentations and art education

journals, including the Journal of Cultural Research in Art Education. Per Duncum and

Springgay’s (2007) assertion that we must “include an understanding of extreme bodies” in art

education (p. 1154), we can no longer omit the critical histories of disabled bodies that portray

disability as extreme. We also must incorporate a “disability aesthetic” (Blandy, 1999) into the

lexicon of cultural artifacts that challenge the “ambivalence with severe physical and mental

abnormality [that] runs deep in pedagogy” (Wexler, 2005, p. 210). In addition to the disability art

that art educators (Blandy, 1999; Eisenhauer, 2007) have discussed, Hockenberry’s essay and

similar articles could function as non-visual examples of disability aesthetic for art education.

I also recommend YouTubeTM and other Web 2.0 (Buffington, 2008; Roland, 2010)

social networking sites as rich visual culture resources for building a disability aesthetic in art

education. One popular example is a series of videos by “silentmiaow” (username of autism

advocate Amanda Baggs), especially In My Language (Baggs, 2007) (Figure 3). The first half of

this video shows Baggs enacting severe autism through flailing arms, vocal chanting, and

rubbing things against her face. In the second part of the video, titled “Translation,” Baggs uses

type and speech technology to explain the first part of the video in which she is simply engaging

her environment in her native language. She challenges her audience to re-conceptualize how

they judge people on the autism spectrum according to observed behavior. Hyperlinked video

responses range from supportive to angry as people debate Baggs’ authenticity and even her

motive. In My Language serves as a useful example of how visual culture can pedagogically

engage disability and its representation.


Figure 3. Stills from Amanda Baggs’s video In My Language. The second frame reads “some

people do not consider [the thoughts of autistic persons] though at all.”

Critical Applications of Disability Studies to Art Education

In addition to the above examination of how disability studies can elaborate art

education’s framing of disability, certain aspects of art education discourses warrant critical

attention (Blandy, 1989b; Eisenhauer, 2007, 2008a). In an effort to “discard those art education

practices that are incongruent with the sociopolitical orientation” (Blandy, 1991, p. 139), I apply

disability studies perspectives to three problematic examples of discursive trends in art education

literature that pertain to outmoded discourses of IDEA (2004).

First, the namesake “special needs” and related terms violate American Psychological

Association (2010) bias standards regarding disability for reasons expressed in disability studies

literature. Linton (1998/2006) points out that while “dictionaries insist that special be reserved

for things that surpass what is common,” the naming of children and education as special “can be

understood only as a euphemistic formulation” (p. 164) that obscures the reality that “neither the

children nor the education are considered desirable and that they are not thought to ‘surpass what

is common’” (p. 164). Such language conveys the “boosterism and do-gooder mentality endemic

of the paternalistic agencies that control many disabled people’s lives” (Linton, p. 163). In the

context of art education, NAEA’s homogenization of “special needs” and “gifted and talented”

students as “Special Populations” promotes an ableist normal/special binary that is visually

mapped as the famed “bell curve,” a modernist, Darwinian invention (Davis, 1995/2006a) that

has been used to justify eugenics and, more recently, to link race with intelligence (Herrnstein &

Murray, 1994). The bell curve reveals the organizational contention: disability is not

synonymous with or even related to “gifts” or “talents,” except sentimentally, and the rare

instances where disability is regarded as meritorious are usually patronizing, stereotypical

compensatory myths such as mad artist (Foucault, 1965/1988), blind musician, and so on.

Another problem with art education discourses is the way disability is categorized

spuriously (Blandy, 1989a) according to inaccurate and pejorative IDEA (2004) language. For

example, NAEA’s bestseller Reaching and Teaching Students with Special Needs through Art

(Gerber & Guay, 2006) contains a chapter titled “Students with Emotional and/or Behavior

Disorders” (Hunter & Johns, 2006) that reflects the contentious (Wexler, 2009) IDEA category

“severe emotional disturbance” (Council for Exceptional Children, n.d.). This umbrella category

lumps disparate mental phenomena (Rottenberg, 2005) in ways that are inconsistent with mental

health research and advocacy. Critics suggest this category “is neither clear nor comprehensive


enough” (Forness & Knitzer, 1992, para. 5), and it erroneously denies social turmoil as a

legitimate cause of distress (Costenbader & Buntaine, 1999; Forness and Knitzer; Merrell &

Walker, 2004). The term “emotional” is inaccurate because emotions constitute a small slice of

the phenomena that yield identifiable “disturbances,” including schizophrenia, autism, anxiety,

post-traumatic stress, everyday stress, pain, depression, mania, other mood issues, psychosis, and

drug use. The term “disturbance” mistakenly criminalizes students, emphasizing “behavior

problems” (p. 43) and modification instead of addressing the causes and effects of underlying

illnesses. In essence, the casting of unwanted behavior as emotional disturbance is conceptually

founded on metaphors that associate illness of the mind with social deviance (Danforth, 2007)

and is employed, not to help identified students learn, but to rationalize isolating them.

At the very least, these two problems indicate that art educators should reject the

categorical stereotypes of IDEA. Our literature should not uncritically reiterate these categories,

and I recommend that NAEA discontinue the endorsement of “special” altogether, including

replacing the term “special needs” with “disability” and by distinguishing gifted and disabled

populations. Likewise, I encourage the SNAE special interest group to consider re-naming itself

something like “Disability and Art Education,” and to actively incorporate a disability aesthetic

and other disability perspectives in its mission statement and online reading list. I am not

suggesting SNAE should break ties with special education, but rather, that it should include

disability studies perspectives.

Lastly, disability studies challenges art education to scrutinize the employment of

disability as a metaphor (Danforth, 2007; Grigely, 2006; Kleege, 2006; Mitchell & Snyder, 2001;

Serlin, 2006). Many disability metaphors operate under ableist presumptions about the way we

see disabled people act, the way we imagine (without much thought) we’d respond if we were in

their shoes, or about their invisibility, appealing to the tired language of stigma with no

consideration of the disability experience. Disability metaphors almost always speak to the

woeful state of disabled people—what they cannot do, the joys they can never know, their

profound ignorance—or they are used for shock value. Such marginalizing metaphors need to be

evaluated and better metaphors need to be sought and nourished; for instance, regarding

disability as a creative style of living.

A prominent example is the recent work of Garoian and Gaudelius (Garoian, 2008, 2010;

Garoian & Gaudelius, 2001, 2004, 2008) which ironically contradicts Garoian’s perennial advice

to challenge stereotyping disability metaphors (Garoian, 2008) that emerge from a medicalized

society and its art (Garoian, 1997). Most notably, the book Spectacle Pedagogy (Garoian &

Gaudelius, 2008) is peppered with disability metaphors, including “cultural narcissism” (p. 23),

“metaphor of schizophrenia” (p. 52), “a stuttering aesthetic” (pp. 99, 100, 113, 114), an anxiety

metaphor (p. 101), “dis-eased pedagogy” (p. 119), and “schizophrenic body” (p. 129). Most of

these are used uncritically. The most offensive, from a disability studies standpoint, is the

description of a performance piece in which Garoian enacts stuttering and anxiety stereotypes as

metaphors. The performance hyper/ventilation (2005) begins with Garoian speaking “A-A-ART

DIED LAST SUMMER …. A-A-ART DIED LAST SUMMER …. WE R-RENTED A COUPLE …” (p. 99), and

so on. Garoian then hyperventilates into a sack, which reportedly symbolizes “the body’s ability

to cope with anxiety under the circumstances of information overload about the war” (p. 101). It

is uncertain from the essay if Garoian has experienced the challenges or stigma of stuttering or

anxiety, but his description of the performance is nothing like my own embodied experience of

perpetual, sometimes acute, anxiety. I am not critiquing Garoian’s adeptness with philosophy or

his motive, but the image of his performance, as he describes it, does nothing to challenge or


even acknowledge the stigma attached to the represented oral communication and anxiety

disabilities. The essay reminds me of the images of timeless cartoons that present such disability

conditions as spectacular and the disabled character as spectacle, such as Porky Pig, Daffy Duck,

and Mr. Magoo. Brown’s (2001) reminder that ableism is akin to racism dares us to consider the

implications of substituting race metaphors for disability metaphors. Imagine if, instead of

Garoian’s reenactment of hyper/ventilation at the 2006 NAEA convention in Chicago (Garoian

& Gaudelius, 2008, p. 99), someone presented a similar performance piece that used a visual

race metaphor such as blackface. Imagine the audience’s reaction: Do people notice? Do they

care?

Another example is Garoian’s (2008, 2010) recent use of prosthesis metaphors. Applying

Derrida to(ward) arts based research, Garoian (2008) theorizes a

Prosthetic pedagogy, an embodied form of art research and teaching that challenges and

resists both the disabling stereotypes and stigmas of the amputated [person] as

dysfunctional, and the fear and loathing of technological supplements that enable the

body’s agency. Indeed, there has existed an interesting correlation between the fear of

disabled bodies and their enabling through prosthetic technology. (p. 224)

Garoian, following the advice of disability studies scholars Mitchell and Snyder (2001),

wishes to “avoid the abuse of disability tropes as ‘opportunistic metaphorical devices’” (p.

223)—but the first thing he does in this article is opportunistically describe the precursory event,

the amputation, as a metaphor. After describing the gruesome wounding of soldiers and

reporters, Garoian transfers these “wounds” to news media: “As amputated bodies of

information, these journalists’ disparate, truncated reports have restricted the public’s

comprehensive and accurate understanding about the circumstances of the war, thus

dismembering the body politic” (p. 218). The rhetoric of this metaphor appeals to the “horror” of

becoming disabled, described above. It goes beyond misunderstanding the nuances of prosthetics

and their meaning in the context of an ableist society to highlight the essential meaning of

mainstream disability metaphors: that disability is understood as incompleteness and loss.

Garoian goes on to cite a number of disability studies theorists who raise this very point, only to

resolutely regard the disabled body as amputated, fragmented—an object that has been reduced,

whose prosthetic does not complete it, but rather provides a novelty for our exploitation and

gaze. It is, as Smith (2006) discusses, a use of techno-fetishism that in this case doubly signifies

de-humanism.

Enabling Interdisciplinary Dialogue

Throughout this article, I have demonstrated how art education benefits from adopting

disability studies perspectives. In closing, I wish to move the discussion forward by suggesting

possibilities for art education scholars to fully participate in the interdisciplinary dialogue of

disability studies.

In addition to the aforementioned policy suggestions, I encourage disability advocates in

art education, including SNAE, to develop a position statement on disability for NAEA. An

acceptable position statement will recognize concerns of the disability community: legal

responsibilities of educators (Kraft, 2004) through IDEA (2004), ADA (1993), and other

legislations; the experiences of art educators and special educators (Gerber & Guay, 2006); and

the value of art education to disabled learners and disability culture (Blandy, 1999).

More broadly, this article implicates discourses that intersect disability and art which art

education scholars could address. First, art therapy needs to be scrutinized insomuch as it is


affiliated with special education and used to treat (and sometimes diagnose) mental illness

(AATA, 2009). Beyond skepticism about the field as a discourse of psychology, there is also

concern that “therapy” is confused with “therapeutic” or understood as a metaphor. Second, in

light of Davis’ (2006b) discussion of obsession, “Outsider Art” demands further attention

regarding its role in diminishing and exploiting institutionalized disabled people (Wexler, 2005).

A critical exploration of contemporary “Outsider Art” could include attention to VSA Arts

(formerly “Very Special Arts”), the prominent national organization which promotes disabled

youth and adult artists. Third, “psychoanalytic” theory, which is increasingly promoted in art

education literature, as the recent (volume 36, issue 2) special issue of Visual Arts Research on

Lacan suggests, needs to be critically analyzed. Research is needed to uncover the paternalistic

implications of psychoanalysis (Foucault , 1965/1988, 1999/2003, 1962/2008, 2003/2008), and

the extent to which such discursive theories actually involve psychoanalyzing individuals or

cultural groups. Such scholarly contributions could benefit both art education and disability

studies.

Art education could also contribute to disability studies research by addressing aspects of

visual culture that are rarely discussed in disability studies research, namely television and the

Internet. Current television represents disability in diverse ways that sometimes perpetuate and

sometimes challenge traditional stereotypes. Mental illness, for example, is represented in at

least three disparate ways: The “Dr. Phil” show promotes a prototypical, paternalistic medical

model; Fox Network’s fictional summertime drama Mental (2009) featured a charismatic,

arguably unqualified chief psychiatrist who uses unorthodox treatments to “get inside patients’

heads”; and the A&E series Obsessed documents long-term treatment of persons diagnosed with

obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) who agree to cognitive behavioral therapy. An analysis of

these and other television shows that represent disability would benefit art education and

disability studies.

In terms of Internet research, specifically social media, a critical vacancy exists. The

Internet is important to disabled studies because adaptive technologies enable many disabled

people to communicate in ways that would otherwise be impossible, and it is important to art

education as a pervasive product of visual culture. An analysis of the pedagogical value of

YouTube™ videos such as In My Words, facebook©, disability-specific networking websites

such as disaboom.com, and email listservs in which disabled people and artists across disciplines

participate could be explored through conversation between fields.

Finally, I believe art educators can develop vibrant contributions to disability studies by

culturing critical artmaking curricula that addresses disability. In addition to the suggestions I’ve

made for expanding disability studies writing activities, artmaking and writing could be

combined to tell graphic narratives about disability. For example, Eisenhauer (2009) recently

published a performative narrative in Disability Studies Quarterly on “(be)coming out” with

mental illness, based on her installation art exhibit titled Admission. This article exemplifies the

interdisciplinary potential for infusing art and writing as a disability studies venture that

advances both fields. Similar to Lewiecki-Wilson and Brueggemann’s (2008) book, which offers

pedagogical writing strategies, art education scholars can research pedagogical art practices that

help disabled and nondisabled students investigate disability. By engaging in scholarly

conversation, art education and disability studies can continue to expand and learn from each

other’s critical knowledge, enabling the pedagogical potential of an inclusive, interdisciplinary

social space.


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Endnotes

1 www.southernct.edu/~gerber/SEDarts/NAEASpecialNeedsIssuesGroup.htm 2 There is no consensus on which term is preferable. The American Psychological Association

(2010) contends that people-first language is preferable, (i.e., people with disabilities), but

disability studies scholars have argued that such language is awkward and distracting and that

“disabled” and other disability terms with negative connotations should be reclaimed. 3 Davis (2006a) links the trope of obsessed artist to Zola’s The Masterpiece, in which an artist is

so obsessed with painting the perfect picture that his obsession consumes him and results in

madness and death. Regarding the artistic process as a form of obsession was normalized in the

romantic period, but it persists in modern and contemporary art (Davis) as well as in stories of


artists, from Paolo Uccello’s (1397–1425) obsession with linear perspective to outsider artists

Adolf Wölfli (1864–1930) whose oeuvre of over 25,000 works indicates obsessive production as

well as content (Davis). 4 Hockenberry (2008) does not explain how he thinks disability and race are “deeply related” (p.

259) to race. He notes that, at one point, every white person ignored him while every black

person offered help. He seems to be arguing that disability visibly indicates minority status, and

that people of majority status avoid minorities whereas minorities are prone to help each other. 5 It is rare to find images of disabled people in popular media, and most existing images

exaggerate disability as a totalizing condition. For instance, Siebers (2003) discusses a film

casting session for homeless characters in which actual homeless people were replaced with

professional actors because the homeless people did not “look” homeless enough.

Author Note

This manuscript is an expansion of concepts and data explored in my dissertation, Art

Education and Disability Studies Perspectives on Mental Illness Discourses.

I thank Professors Jennifer F. Eisenhauer and Scot Danforth for their input on developing

this article.

Correspondence regarding this article may be sent to the author at: The University of

Kansas, Department of Visual Art, College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, Art & Design Building,

1467 Jayhawk Blvd., Room 300, Email: [email protected]

disability studies and art education

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