“Companions”

The documentary Crip Camp presents a 1970s summer camp for disabled youth as a place of friendship and political dialogues that spawned the American disability rights movement. The film also represented Camp Jened as a haven of racial harmony and inclusion. Jened was not the only American micro-community of disability solidarity and political possibilities that also involved questions of racial politics. Scholars have criticized disability activists and disability studies scholars for neglecting problems of racial oppression. This historical study examines three examples of empowering disability subcultures in twentieth century America: Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Warm Springs rehabilitation resort from the mid-1920s through the mid-1940s, the Rolling Quads at the University of California, Berkeley, in the late 1960s, and Camp Interdependence in California in the 1980s. The article interrogates the racial politics of these egalitarian communities.

Curing Monsters in Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz’s Dr. Mütter’s Marvels: A True Tale of Intrigue and Innovation at the Dawn of Modern Medicine

Critically praised for its portrayal of a compassionate physician, Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz’s 2014 New York Times bestselling biography, Dr. Mütter’s Marvels: A True Tale of Intrigue and Innovation at the Dawn of Modern Medicine, follows the life and work of Thomas Dent Mütter, an eccentric and brilliant man who supposedly cured his patients of their unacceptable deformities, thus excising their socially-constructed monstrosity. A continual emphasis on curing benign physical difference in this text is troubling, however, as cure implies a default normative body exists. By characterizing the fact that Mütter treated unique bodies as an act of heroism, the biography upholds ideals that people with unique bodies must live up to unattainable standards. Aptowicz’s emphasis on this idea creates an excavation-worthy rhetoric surrounding curative violence as it meets benign corporeal difference. In her work on curative violence, Eunjung Kim constructs the disability proxy, or person who assists the disabled or different to return to their normative state, and Mütter most certainly occupies this proxy position in Aptowicz’s biography. In the wake of curative violence, bodies that deviate from an unattainable norm must labor at all costs to reach its ill-defined center, lest they carry a stigmatizing label: monster. Through this process of emphasizing the heroic curative practices of doctors, the biographer inadvertently conjures up ableist tropes. While biographers like Aptowicz have the best of intentions when deploying the term cure, even the best of intentions benefit from critique.

“She Finds People Like You Hilarious!”

For centuries, people with dwarfism have been sought after for humorous entertainment purposes. Even today, dwarfs are employed within various forms of lowbrow entertainment that is unique to them. This begs the question, why do we laugh at people with dwarfism?1 Using superiority and inferiority theories, the article aims to demonstrate why we laugh at dwarfs by exploring both historical and present forms of dwarf entertainment. Laughing at dwarfs is a form of disablism that permits dwarfism to be deemed inferior within society due to their non-normative embodiment. The article demonstrates some of the implications this sort of humour has upon how people with dwarfism are perceived and subsequently treated within society. The article calls for a more ethical consideration of the humour used in relation to dwarfism with the entertainment industry.

Reflections on Crip Imitations as Cultural Space-Making

The article reflects on the complexities of deploying imitation as a performance theme within disability arts. The authors are animated by disability arts curator Amanda Cachia’s 2019 exhibition, Automatisme Ambulatoire: Hysteria, Imitation, and Performance, which showcased disabled and nondisabled artists exploring the cultural dynamics of imitation through the performing arts. The article begins by considering how imitation enacts proximal familiarity with difference by discussing disability simulation activities, actor training systems, and forms of cultural appropriation. A disability studies framework is employed to consider how artists engage imitation as an element of disability aesthetics. The analysis is developed in conversation with four examples of disability performance—Helen Dowling’s Breaker, Claire Cunningham’s tributary, Sins Invalid’s performance An Unshamed Claim to Beauty, and Jess Thom’s rendition of Samuel Beckett’s Not I. The article posits that by enacting imitation as a performance theme, disabled artists resist notions that imitation is reserved for bodies read as “neutral,” and attend to how imitation brings disability artists into a complex dynamic of political relationality.

The Included

A culture of inclusion pervades Singapore, one where disabled bodies are marked and folded into life by the state and its associated agencies. The effect of this inclusion has been the production of a new figure of disability, or what I call the included. In the midst of this inclusion, the disabled-led production of And Suddenly I Disappear: The Singapore ‘d’ Monologues in May 2018 marks a key milestone. The article considers the deployment of disability within the production and how it resists hegemonic representations of disabled people in Singapore. Particular consideration is given to the production’s orientation toward the disabled subject and the following questions: How is disability mobilized with and against this climate of inclusion? How is the disabled body deployed to resist hegemonic and ableist constructs of disability within inclusion, where disabled bodies are included because they are regarded as productive subjects of the nation-state? What kinds of productive tensions exist between the included and the disabled subject?