Art, Movement, and Disability: Transcending the Beauty Paradigm

This book explores how artists with disabilities have provided social, emotional, psychological, and physical context for understanding the complexities surrounding disability.

Breaking new ground, this book uses an interdisciplinary-thematic approach to understanding disability through the eyes of contemporary practicing artists. In this sense, it has three broad objectives. First, to consider the value of artists’ perspectives to disability studies. Second, to encourage a more inclusive representation of artists with disabilities within the study of the arts. And finally, to highlight the significance of disability arts to a humanities education. Among the themes explored through the work of these artists are disability stereotypes; associations of disability with imperfection, incompleteness, and neurodivergence; enfreakment, attraction/repulsion, spectacle, and stigmatization of difference; asymmetry and idiosyncratic movement; and broadened perspectives that involve intimacy, empathy, vulnerability, and transcendence.

The book will be of interest to scholars in art history, disability studies, the arts, and the medical humanities.

Timothy W. Hiles is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Tennessee. His interdisciplinary approach has led to publications on philosophy and art, literature and art, and disability and art.