Mar. 12 Access to the Social: How Do We Read and Respond to Disabled Bodies?; Andries Hiskes

Theory Stairs, 2:00-3:30 PM; moderator Menko Dijksterhuis

A common phrase often seen in disability studies is that “not all disabilities are visible.” While this is true, even bodies that are visibly disabled do not always automatically “make sense” to others who have never witnessed such a body, probing the question “how does this body work?”. In this talk, I explore how issues of the legibility of disabled bodies—how people try to read and interpret bodies—is intimately connected with a variety of affective responses, such as wonder, fear, or even disgust. I discuss different artworks that engage with the difficulty of reading disability, and how disability often becomes the subject of intense aesthetic fascination. Additionally, we will also look at how and why aesthetic judgement can become a way to relate to bodies that seemingly defy conventional explanation or interpretation.

Andries Hiskes is assistant professor at the University of Humanistic Studies. His research focuses on how cultural texts and artefacts construct ways of reading and aesthetically evaluating the disabled body as a form of relationality, and how reading practices themselves can become a matter of (dis)ability within cultural texts and artworks. His academic work has been published in Textual Practice, The Journal of Posthuman Studies and Somatechnics: Journal of Bodies – Technologies – Power, among others.