“Let Me Be Your Stimy Toy”: Fashioning Disability, Crip** Fashion

Abstract

This chapter considers how previously marginalised corporealities get incorporated into the visual mainstream and asks how—and if—fashion can help to disrupt the canons of bodily normalcy. It sets out a theoretical framework for analysing images of disability by outlining the four dominant strategies for representing disabled and other non-normative bodies in visual culture: “enfreakment” (Garland-Thomson, Introduction: From Wonder to Error—A Genealogy of Freak Discourse in Modernity. In R. Garland-Thomson (Ed.), Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body. University Press, 1996); “mainstreaming”, a strategy that invites the viewer to negate and disregard the bodily difference (Smith, The Vulnerable Articulate: James Gillingham, Aimee Mullins, and Matthew Barney. In J. Morra & M. Smith (Eds.), The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future. The MIT Press, 2006); “disability aesthetics” (Siebers, Disability Aesthetics. University of Michigan Press, 2010); and “crip aesthetics”. It then discusses recent representations of disabled bodies in fashion and lifestyle media that perform or challenge these strategies, focusing on images of amputee performer and model Viktoria Modesta, amputee war veteran and model Noah Galloway, model Melanie Gaydos as shot by photographer Tim Walker and the fashion performances organised by non-binary queer and disabled Filipinx artist and designer Sky Cubacub. I will argue that the latter projects are examples of “disability aesthetics”: they offer alternative and radical ways of representing disability within a fashion context and celebrate visible difference as a source of creative potential, rather than attempting to normalise or fetishise it, thus “crip**” fashion.