Go figure! Public pedagogies, invisible impairments and the performative paradoxes of visibility as veracity

Abstract

This article asks how public pedagogical texts mobilise particular meanings about whose bodies/minds matter or figure? How do they articulate particular affective investments, desires, and values related to our everyday understanding of invisible and visible impairments, and the ways in which discourses of 'normalcy' are taught? The author examines three examples of public pedagogy or media campaigns to educate the public about particular invisible impairments experienced predominantly by women. It theorises how women with invisible impairments are seen to lack veracity in Western visual cultures that both equate and privilege the visible with truthfulness and authenticity. The paper considers, after Agamben, the 'zones of exception' created by the in/visible hierarchy for disability rights claims and human rights struggles for women with invisible impairments.

Work and Invisible Disabilities: Practices, Experiences and Understandings of (Non)Disclosure

“…Given that people are categorized as able or disabled based on what is visible (Roman 2009;Samuels 2005), those with invisible disabilities are often met with distrust because they do not look disabled or ill (Lingsom 2008;Stone 2005;Åsbring & Närvänen 2002). Consequently, others often question the validity of the disability (Mullins & Preyde 2012).…”

Representing Disability, D/deaf, and Mad Artists and Art in Journalism: Identifying Ableist Fault Lines and Promising Crip Practices of Representation

“…Erlich shared this disability cultural practice, identifying as hard of hearing and fluent in ASL. There is also a tendency toward "diagnoses-dropping," an ableist practice whereby an artist's biomedical diagnosis becomes a focal point, instead of the artist and their work, thus revealing both a hegemonic biomedical view of disability and an ableist compulsion to disclose disability (Roman, 2009), both of which are irrelevant when it comes to the work.…”

Alterity In/Of Happiness: Reflecting on the radical possibilities of unruly bodies

“…There are clues as to how we might begin to think about how happiness in difference is experienced and expressed when we attend to artistic and performative examples of how happiness exists on the margins, in countercultures and arts communities. For example, since the 1980s, the disability arts and culture movement has been an integral part of the Disability Rights Movement (DRM) across North America and in the UK (Abbas, et al, 2004;Roman, 2009aRoman, , 2009b. The DRM, which emerged in the 1970s alongside other rights-based social movements such as the women's movement, the civil rights movement, and the queer liberation movement, was initially concerned with, and quite successful at, securing legal and civil rights for disabled people by engaging in policy reform and creating accessibility legislation (Oliver, 1991(Oliver, , 1996Shakespeare, 2006).…”

“…The vibrant disability arts movement that has developed in recent years as a new genre in Europe and North America gives expression to disability experience and challenges imposed marginalization by reimagining mental and physical difference (Allan, 2005;Gorman, 2007;Roman, 2009aRoman, , 2009b. Although (as yet) no parallel selfproclaimed fat arts movement has emerged to revision fat bodies in similar ways, artists like popular American 'zine writer, illustrator, and cartoonist Nomy Lamm, British portrait painter Jenny Saville (2005Saville ( , 2011, and Canadian self-described maximalist sculpture and installation artist Allyson Mitchell have, over the past twenty years, worked to resignify the fat female form.…”