ABSTRACT

This volume analyzes representations of disability in art from antiquity to the twenty-first century, incorporating disability studies scholarship and art historical research and methodology.

This book brings these two strands together to provide a comprehensive overview of the intersections between these two disciplines. Divided into four parts:

  • Ancient History through the 17th Century: Gods, Dwarfs, and Warriors
  • 17th-Century Spain to the American Civil War: Misfits, Wounded Bodies, and Medical Specimens
  • Modernism, Metaphor and Corporeality
  • Contemporary Art: Crips, Care, and Portraiture

and comprised of 16 chapters focusing on Greek sculpture, ancient Chinese art, Early Italian Renaissance art, the Spanish Golden Age, nineteenth century art in France (Manet, Toulouse-Lautrec) and the US, and contemporary works, it contextualizes understandings of disability historically, as well as in terms of medicine, literature, and visual culture.

This book is required reading for scholars and students of disability studies, art history, sociology, medical humanities and media arts.

chapter |5 pages

Introduction

part 1|64 pages

Ancient history through the seventeenth century

chapter 1|15 pages

Hephaestus represented

A mêtis-based inquiry

chapter 4|17 pages

Disability at the edge of war

Gendered violence in the graphic practice of Urs Graf

part 2|49 pages

Seventeenth-century Spain to the American Civil War

chapter 5|14 pages

Destierro and Desengaño

The disabled body in Golden Age Spanish portraiture

chapter 6|17 pages

An inartistic interest

Civil War medicine, disability, and the art of Thomas Eakins*

chapter 7|16 pages

Empty sleeves and bloody shirts

Disabled American Civil War veterans and presidential campaigns, 1864–1880

part 3|100 pages

Modernism, metaphor, and corporeality

chapter 8|17 pages

Deaf gain

Toulouse-Lautrec's early training with René Princeteau

chapter 9|17 pages

Manet's syphilis

Masculinity, debility, and adaptation in the 1880s*

chapter 10|15 pages

Facially disfigured veterans of World War I in present-day art

An art historical analysis against the background of medical history

chapter 11|15 pages

Disability metaphor and American individualism

Beyond The Glass Menagerie

chapter 12|17 pages

“Building the World of Tomorrow”

Disability, eugenics, and sculpture at the 1939 New York World's Fair

part 4|47 pages

Contemporary art

chapter 15|16 pages

Collaborative portraiture

A feminist disability studies approach to the work of Riva Lehrer and Tanya Raabe-Webber

chapter 16|16 pages

Performing Disability and Endurance

On Carolyn Lazard's Support System (for Tina, Park, and Bob)