ABSTRACT
This chapter's proposition—res(crip)ting art therapy with disability culture—grew from author's concerns about therapeutic practices, including art therapy, that overlook social justice for disabled people. It critiques the deficit model of art therapy and then illustrates a working definition of how disability culture can help broaden the perspective of art therapy. Disability studies scholars have critiqued art therapy for being an extension of normalization and the product of the "epistemologies of able-bodiedness". Disability studies scholars also critique art therapy for employing an individualized approach, which depoliticizes and decontextualizes disabled people's cultural expressions. The chapter argues that an interventionist analogy of disability in art therapy only works to further the othering of disabled people; by incorporating an intersectional view of disability. Disability culture in the mental health care industry, art therapists will create long-term systematic change at a grassroots level and a more encompassing, sustainable social justice-based art therapy practice.
