Cognitive Disability Aesthetics: Visual Culture, Disability Representations, and the (In)Visibility of Cognitive Difference

289 Pages·2018·58.24 MB·English

by  Benjamin Fraser

COGNITIVE DISABILITY AESTHETICS
Visual Culture, Disability Representations,
and the (In)Visibility of Cognitive Difference
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COGNITIVE DISABILITY AESTHETICS
Visual Culture, Disability
This page intentionally left blank Representations, and the
(In)Visibility of Cognitive Difference
BENJAMIN FRASER
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS
Toronto Buffalo London
© University of Toronto Press 2018
Toronto Buffalo London
utorontopress.com
Printed in the U.S.A.
ISBN 978-1-4875-0233-1
Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper
with vegetable-based inks.
Toronto Iberic
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Fraser, Benjamin, author
Cognitive disability aesthetics : visual culture, disability representations,
and the (in)visibility of cognitive difference / Benjamin Fraser.
(Toronto Iberic ; 32)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4875-0233-1 (cloth)
1. Disability studies.  2. Aesthetics.  3. Cognition disorders − Social aspects −
Spain.  4. Popular culture − Spain.  5. Arts − Spain.  I. Title.  II. Series: Toronto
Iberic ; 32
HV1568.2.F73 2018 704.9'496168 C2017-906090-2
This book has been published with the assistance of the Thomas Harriot
College of Arts and Sciences at East Carolina University.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its
publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts
Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.
Funded by the Financé par le
Government gouvernement
of Canada du Canada
For Ben, Abby, and Judd

Contents
Preface ix
Introduction 3
Part One: Theorizing Visual Disability Representations
1 On the (In)Visibility of Cognitive Disability 29
2 Signification and Staring: Icon, Index, and Symbol
in Visual Media 49
3 Disability Scholarship at the Seam: The Materiality
of Visual Narrative 73
Part Two: Cognition, Collaboration, Community
4 Visualizing Down Syndrome and Autism: The Trazos Singulares
(Singular Strokes) (2011) Exhibition and María cumple 20 años
(María Turns Twenty) (2015) 97
5 Sequencing Alzheimer’s Dementia: Paco Roca’s Graphic Novel
Arrugas (Wrinkles) (2008) 136
6 Screening Schizophrenia: Documentary Cinema, Cognitive
Disability, and Abel García Roure’s Una cierta verdad
(A Certain Truth) (2008) 170
Conclusion 199
viii Contents
Notes 205
References 237
Index 259
Preface
Three book-length publications are arguably the foundational contri-
butions to the study of physical disability representations in the aes-
thetic realm: Martin Norden’s Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical
Disabilities in the Movies (1994), which traces the centrality of disabled
characters in one hundred years of American film; David Mitchell and
Sharon Snyder’s innovative and foundational Narrative Prosthesis:
Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (2000), which privileges the
nuances of literary disability representation; and Tobin Siebers’s
Disability Aesthetics (2010), which brought a similarly innovative thesis
to bear on visual art forms, prioritizing painting and sculpture. Norden
writes that “the history of physical disability images in the movies has
mostly been a history of distortion in the name of maintaining an able-
ist society” (1994: 314). Mitchell and Snyder’s book “argues that images
of disabled people abound in history” (2000: 52) and that “once a reader
begins to seek out representations of disability in our literatures, it is
difficult to avoid their proliferation in texts with which one believed
oneself to be utterly familiar” (2000: 52). Siebers’s argument asserts that
in painting and sculpture, the presence of disability is the element that
has allowed “the beauty of an artwork to endure over time” (2010: 5).
The representation of disability is, each text argues in its own way, thus
central to the aesthetic histories of these directions in human cultural
production. Often under-acknowledged as such in both literary and
visual art, physical disability has long been clothed in the normative
trappings of an able-bodied society and mobilized to suit a range of
symbolic, metaphorical, and perhaps even purportedly transcendent
artistic purposes.