ABSTRACT
The ideology of the assigning of value to the body goes back to preindustrial times. Myths of beauty and ugliness have laid the foundations for normalcy. In particular, the Venus myth is one that is dialectically linked to another. In the Venus tradition, Medusa is a poignant double. She is the necessary counter in the dialectic of beauty and ugliness, desire and repulsion, wholeness and fragmentation. Medusa is the disabled woman to Venus’s perfect body. The story is a kind of allegory of a ‘normal’ person’s intersection with the disabled body. This intersection is marked by the power of the visual. The 'disabled body' belongs to no one, just as the normal body, or even the ‘phallus’ belongs to no one. Even a person who is missing a limb, or is physically ‘different’, still has to put on, assume, the disabled body and identify with it.
