The Power to See: Visualizing Invisible Disabilities in China

Abstract

Situated in a Chinese context, this study explores how people with disabilities struggle to be re-envisioned in contemporary China. In particular, this visual essay uses the Disabled Women’s Album as a case study to illustrate how the deployment of their visual images can provide a place for disabled women to fight for the power of visibility in a Chinese context, including the right to be seen and the right to look. On one hand, the visual images of the disabled women establishes a realm in which actors, actions and ideas can be viewed, including the right to be seen by the public, as an alternative to the possibility of disappearing in Chinese society, the right to visual self-representation and the right to equal conditions. On the other hand, the fight for people with disabilities to achieve the power to see also increases opportunities for people without disabilities to exercise their right to look, including recognizing the diversity of our society and realizing the existence of more possibilities in life. In this process, images are no longer just a medium by which we communicate our political activities but have also become an end in themselves.

Celebrating 20 Years of Visual Communication

“…In this regard, we see much scholarship reflecting the need for greater diversity of disciplines and approaches, of topics and themes, and of visual and multimodal representations of factors such as ability, gender, and ethnicity (see for example, Caple and Tian, 2022; Zhongxuan and Lin, 2021). We see great potential for visual communication scholarship to impact positively on contexts and fields such as politics (Chu 2021; Varvantakis & Nolas 2021), healthcare , both mental and physical (as with Bennett, this issue; Forceville & Paling 2018; Mondada, this issue; Robson, 2022), and our understanding of critical social crises , such as the experience of refugees (Catalani 2019; De La Presa and Ruiz, 2021), environmental disaster (Björkvall and Archer, 2021; Kwesell, 2021) and of course, the pandemic (Luvaas, this issue; Selamet, this issue; Yu and Yan, 2021).…”