Disability and Contemporary Performance

Chapter 3

Deconstructing images

Performing disability

The disabled performer is both marginalized and invisible – relegated to borderlands, far outside the central area of cultural activity, by the discourses of medicine. At the same time, people with physical impairments are also hypervisible, instantly defined by their physicality. The physically impaired performer has therefore to negotiate two areas of cultural meaning: invisibility as an active member in the public sphere, and hypervisibility and instant categorization as passive consumer and victim in much of the popular imagination.

Disabled performers have successfully and visibly taken up the medium of performance to expand the possibilities of images, spaces and positions for their ...