Art serves as a critical force for interruption, particularly when it comes to the neoliberal and ideological classifications of ‘human’ and ‘body.’ After providing theoretical and historical groundwork for these categories, this paper turns toward visual art in order to propose that our understandings of ourselves and one another are incomplete. I follow the works of disability artists Katie Dallam, Laura Ferguson, and Sunaura Taylor in order to analyze moments of transgression and interruption within their paintings. This allows for an exploration into the interdependency that is raised by scholars Susan Crutchfield and Marcy Epstein as they inquire “how to break through the mutually crippling hierarchy, how to convey that we are each other’s shadows, one flesh.” I propose that disability artwork offers a moment of critical and necessary interruption to the Western discourse, displacing and de-stabilizing the assumptions of what constitutes a ‘human’ and a ‘body,’ proposing instead a multiplicity and fluidity of meaning.
emet ezell (Mon,) studied this question.