Gesture toward Justice

Linger…and find that disability is not limited…linger and find out how difference is disruptive—how that disruption is freeing from the shackles of expectation, productivity, and the status quo.

We write from a Critical Disability Studies (CDS) perspective, which embraces the diversity and intertwining of communities—e.g., of ability, race, sex, gender, age, size, Indigeneity, citizenship status, class, linguistic, and extra-linguistic. CDS rejects the narrow view of personhood, what are seen as taken-for-granted practices and what is assumed to constitute a “good life” in many societies. As a trans- and interdisciplinary field of study, CDS centres these diverse communities and their knowledges. As an academic-activist scholarship, CDS supports and nurtures disability cultures, arts, and political activism at all levels.  An oral history approach was important for this project to document disabled artists’ origins, personal histories, stories, blocks, and avenues to where they are now.  

Jeff Thomas: Oral history has been a tenet in the Indigenous world\… With this in mind, I thought about oral history and how important it is\ my elders would comment on a knowledge keeper’s passing, and say that there was no one to pass his or her knowledge to…  Disabled artists are largely absent from the Canadian arts canon—the story that’s told about arts in this country. In interviewing disabled artists, this oral history project tells the story of how they have influenced and contributed to the Canadian arts scene, and most importantly, how they have tried to make it more accessible—in the broadest sense of the term. Disabled artists have made art practices more accessible to disabled communities through mentoring, and exhibiting art in and outside of gallery systems. 

Sean Lee: Accessible curatorial practices (e.g. Zoom art gallery exhibit tours, use of ASL) are leading the way and having documentaries and capacity to historicize this knowledge\ learn these experiments that are happening and showing there is a history\… is a really, rare opportunity.  

Disabled artists define what it means to be an artist and to engage in different art forms—from dancing, to singing, sewing, and sculpting. They have contributed to the transformation of these contemporary and ancient practices—opening them up, slowing them down, retooling, hacking, and tinkering, playing with what is im\possible. 

We learned this history of disabled arts and artists in Canada because we lingered on their stories. After all, oral history as a methodology is one of sitting down, asking a few questions, and listening closely to a long story of life, death, and everything in between. This is a methodology that takes time, is patient, and asks one to travel back and consider the life journey that brought them to the now. What is generated in this process is expansive. A whole life story. In it, you find moments that describe inevitable change and openings to reimagine these inevitabilities.  

nancy: oral history is at least for me \ an orientation to a larger history but also my history \ which awakens & ties itself to my day to day life \ so oral history can feel like an exposure \ being exposed \ i don’t want to return to a trauma filled past \ & i don't necessarily want others to know \  i don’t want the words \ my languaging of a past to turn into a something \ not sure what \ but i don’t always want to live in the present moment unsettled \ & yet this is also \ this body \ is also where the work lives \ it's a specific embodiment that exists & communicates in subtle & imperfect ways \ & what makes it complicated is that this body depends on so many others for its existence  

as an artist i think i'm always engaged in work & drawn to work that exceeds the boundaries of conventional arts culture & which may never be acknowledged outside of or beyond those spaces \ maybe it's useful to imagine dis arts as a reconfiguration \ a movement beyond the ways in which disability and the areas are circumscribed \ but i also recognize that conventional space as a legitimate one \ although for me the conventions don't really fit...  

remember — everything i say or feel or think is inadequate & not enough & that's ok \ lets imagine making visible some small part of a social fabric that perceives \ the arts as enlivened \ that refuse linear and objectifying categorizations \ that support the onto|epistemological existence of artists \ who provide a form of an otherwise through works that do\can\not answer the questions being asked with confidence or precision \ which defy the (en)closure secure answers offer 

We learned that crip aesthetics are a response to living—really, surviving—in an ableist world. In many of their oral life histories, the artists describe their art as responding to what it’s like to move through a world that doesn’t imagine them as part of it…and how this leaves marks on the body. Crip aesthetics are often a response to these lingering marks—from medicalization, stigmatization, and devaluation. Disability is too easily abjected as is disability art. We invite you to turn into it—to linger—to learn and feel its affective capacities. Doing so is one way of valuing the disruptive possibilities of disability that can lead us toward building cripped worlds.