Unexpected Anatomies: Extraordinary Bodies in Contemporary Art
Professor Ann M. Fox
Date: Wednesday 2nd March, 2016
Time: 2.15pm–3.45pm
Place: Eden109, Liverpool Hope University, UK
As a curator who has now co-curated three disability arts-related exhibitions, Professor Fox continually asks: what do works about bodily difference give voice to the lived experience of disability? How do these works dissect what we think we know about the disabled body? And in recognizing this, can we see examples of difference as what Rosemarie Garland-Thomson calls “disability gain”—those things that prod us to understand what disability brings creatively into being? Disability works to dismantle the hierarchy that presumes the inherent superiority of normalcy. Building on Tobin Siebers’s notion of disability aesthetics, this talk will explore anatomies in contemporary disability art that are unexpected in subject and approach. Empowered by the imaginative possibility of disability, they look at the body slant — and disrupt the conventions of an already overdetermined look at the body that, ironically, hides new ways of knowing and possibilities in plain sight.
Ann M. Fox is Professor of English at Davidson College, USA, where she specializes in modern and contemporary dramatic literature and disability studies. Her scholarship on disability and theater has been supported by an AAUW postdoctoral fellowship and published widely. Her current book project traces the representation of disability on the 20th-century commercial stage. She has made a number of contributions to the work of the CCDS, including a chapter in Disability, Avoidance and the Academy (Routledge, 2016), papers at conferences, and articles in the Journal of Literary Disability Studies.
This seminar is part of the CCDS series, The Voice of Disability. Other dates include:
20th Apr 2016, “The President has been shot”: Reagan, Wounded Heroes and the Cyborg Soldier in American Science Fiction of the 1980s, Susan Smith.
25th May 2016, Tales from the Crip: Narrative Reconstructions of the Storyteller’s Disabled Male Body in Contemporary Gothic Fiction, Alan Gregory.
29th Jun 2016, Voices of Becoming, Laura Waite.
For further information please contact Dr. David Bolt, Centre for Culture and Disability Studies.