The Disability Gaze: Material and Visual Approaches (appel à communications)
Le Center for Material Culture Studies (CMCS) de l’Université du Delaware lance un appel à propositions pour sa troisième conférence bisannuelle, qui aura lieu à l’Université du Delaware, les 29 et 30 avril 2022. Date limite de soumission des propositions : 15 septembre 2021.
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How does being disabled change the ways people view the world and the things they create? What generative possibilities does disability provoke? Valuable scholarship has explored disabled people as objects of vision and charted the phenomenon of staring which historically cast them as “curiosities,” “freaks,” and as “other.” “The Disability Gaze” will address the opposite phenomenon, considering disabled people as subjects and the power of their gazes as they claim and assert their own performance, identity, and even citizenship. Such assertions happen across representational forms, and this conference asks how physical and mental conditions inform the work of artists, designers, authors, performers, and prosthetic users. In what ways have disabled people shaped representations of themselves in images, objects/artifacts, and literature? What kinds of subjecthood have been produced at the intersections of disability and materiality? How have artists incorporated assistive devices or prostheses in their framing of self? We ask participants to consider how the disability gaze creates objects of visual and material culture and in doing so asserts disabled people’s subjectivity. This conference seeks, through an interdisciplinary and material culture approach, to reclaim the disability gaze as it extends into lived experience.
Topics/Areas may include but are not limited to:
- how disabled people have portrayed themselves
- negotiated modes of picturing disability in art and literature
- creation of empathy through representation
- designed objects and artifacts of technology
- advertisements and ephemera targeted at disabled users
- contemporary and performance artists’ responses to disability
- theoretical frameworks of the “disability gaze”
- decolonizing disabled stories and identities