Feminist Disability Aesthetics 2.0

This essay examines Danish visual artist Luna Scales’s video artwork Physical Status Report 2.0 (2021) through the lens of disability aesthetics and feminist disability studies. Building on Tobin Siebers’s Disability Aesthetics, which emphasizes disability’s centrality in modern art, and feminist disability studies’ imperative to demetaphorize and capture the lived experiences of disabled embodiment, the essay foregrounds the disabled female body as an emergent aesthetic refiguration of the female nude. In Scales’s artwork, disability becomes the primary aesthetic point of suspense. The video’s audio narration about the experience of disabled embodied being critically intervenes with the classic sculpturesque, white, feminized, and able-bodied aestheticization of Scales’s own body as the central visual figuration in the video. By creating a series of tensions adhering to the omnipresence of medicalized, self-disciplinary gazes of disability and femininity, the video demands that viewers question the terms of female beauty, power, and visibility, while also confronting them with the potentials of a feminist disability aesthetics, in which the disabled female body is refigured as an emergent resource in contemporary imageries of the body. Furthermore, the digital video format draws clear associations with self-representational expressions in social media visual cultures. While Web 2.0 has expanded visual self-representation through popular feminist economies of visibility, disabled female artists remain at the margins of art-making practices. Therefore, what I term a “feminist disability aesthetics 2.0” not only highlights the urgency of capturing and negotiating the politics of embodied difference but also critically questions the inequitable embodied conditions of art-making practices themselves.