Thursday, August 15, 2013

Feminism and disability.

It occurred to me today as both boxes come a bit further into being just how clearly masculine box two is and how conversely feminine box 1 is even though there has been no deliberate intention. It's entirely appropriate though and it's funny/interesting that even though I hadn't consciously intended this it has regardlessly emerged in the work, inadvertently. For there is much in disability identity politics that bears a feminist reading. For example Aristotle in his Generation Of Animals is the first to cast femaleness as a pathology "Anyone who does not take after his parents is really in a way a monstrosity, since in these ways nature has strayed from the generic type. The beginning of this deviation is when a female is formed instead of a male". Another example Freud's description of a woman as a mutilated male. Most applicable to my work though is feminist reading of the cult of invalidism in the 19th Century. While both men and women were afflicted it was quite an acceptable (and, it is suggested, inevitable) identity for women to assume and a somewhat emasculating experience for men. It makes sense that a culture which rejects any kind of sympathetic identification with disability and invalidism should be a culture that projects a masculine identity and so, I guess reasonable that Box 2 should be overtly male. And vice versa for box 1.
And then of course that Box 2 is in a sense the embodiment of western democracy and individualism as modelled around a very narrow concept of the 'normal' individual - the young, white, athletic, heterosexual male. Emphasis on male.

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