Styled resistance: disabled aesthetics, everyday archives, and contemporary Activism

This article examines disabled self-styling and self-representation as contemporary activism, asking what such practices reveal about whether things are getting better for disabled people. Drawing on a photo essay, The Essence of Opulence, produced in a modest hotel room using an iPhone, it treats aesthetics as political authorship rather than personal expression. Centring the lived experience of a disabled Black woman in the Global South, it challenges narratives that equate progress solely with institutional inclusion or socio-economic indicators. Engaging disability studies, Black feminist thought, and visual culture scholarship, it argues that while structural inequalities persist, disabled people are asserting control over representation and expanding activist form. Through image analysis, it shows how styling, objects, and domestic space operate as aesthetic interventions that refuse pity and erasure. It concludes that “getting better” must be understood materially, through authorship and power.