Disarming Venus: Disability and the Re-Vision of Art History

Ann Millet

Feminist performance art flourished in the 1970s as part of the feminist art movement, a revival of traditionally feminine crafts and practices, as well as movements for feminist rights and theory.  Artists such as Carolee Schneemann, Hannah Wilke, Adrian Piper, Eleanor Antin, Karen Finley, Yayoi Kusama, and others performed before audiences and cameras, often in the nude, to celebrate the female body and reclaim it from multiple histories of objectification.  Feminist performers, through bodily self-exhibition and self-authorization, exposed how visual culture has depended on sexual exploitation and often violence against the female body, enacting an erasure of female subjectivity.  Rejecting masculine-biased trends in art history associated, such as formalism, disinterest, and commodification of the art object, these feminists used their bodies as art to upset the status quo.  While feminist performance waned in impact over the decade, and in the eyes of many became absurd, the work broke ground for other minority artists who battled the same biases in the history of art and asserted their social visibility. 

Feminist performance forged a number of intensely personal and confrontational art practices that were explicitly embodied, setting the stage for the disability arts and rights movements of the 1980s and beyond.  For example, Irish artist Mary Duffy, born without arms, delivers live performances in the nude and produces performative photographs of her body that highlight its likeness to the Venus de Milo, as a Classical drapery falls from her otherwise naked body.  Duffy’s work utilizes what performance scholar Rebecca Schneider (1997) has termed the “explicit body” in performance – a literal, material body that complicates purely symbolic or idealized forms of the nude.  These bodies, like Duffy’s, disrupt social perceptions of body standards and assert their visible, tangible corporealities, as well as their particularized bodily experiences.  Yet, whereas much feminist performance art has targeted displays of the female body as a site of infinite desire and possession, Duffy confronts a sexual economy from which her body has been excluded, rejected, and made freakish.  Her performative self-exhibition is an activist intervention into this history.  She uses a feminist practice of performance, embedded in feminist theories surrounding the body and the gaze, to make a bold and socially transformative statement about disability.  Through a reading of Duffy’s performance, I will show also the legacy of feminist theory for disability studies and rights movements.   

In a 1995 live performance at a Disability Arts Conference, Mary Duffy laid herself bare.   Posing in the nude, she verbally exposed how her disabled body is characteristically defined as broken and lacking.  She reflected upon her confrontations with medical and social gazes and how they impacted her own sense of self.  Duffy’s performative act transgressed the boundaries between representation and everyday life, as it simultaneously refigured histories of art and performance.  Duffy’s body as the armless nude invoked the Classical Venus de Milo, while at the same time offered itself as a vulnerable human being and naked medical specimen.  In a self-objectifying act, Duffy explained how her body was already objectified in society, and in the act of talking back, Duffy’s monologue became social dialogue.

In this performance, the unclothed, armless body was the single visual object that remained motionless, like a statue, medical model, or frozen subject of a clinical photograph, yet this body was provocative in speaking about itself.  “You have words to describe me,” Duffy began in her condemnation of the medical profession: “Congenital malformation.”  Duffy remembered herself as a frightened child, searching for self-definition in the dictionary, “Congenital meant ‘from birth,’” she states, leaving the idea of “malformation” to the audience’s imagination.  She then addressed the public at large that gazes upon her as she repeated questions that she routinely receives: “Were you born like that or did your mother take those dreadful tablets?  Did you have an accident?”  These intrusive questions are common in the social interactions of disabled people and are based on the assumption that because the body deviates from the norm, it is open for public scrutiny and diagnosis.  The reactions of others to her body, according to Duffy, include encouraging her to hide, deny her body, and remain invisible.   

Duffy transformed conventional language, expressing how it feels to be “disabled” – spoken for and objectified, disarmed and subjugated, stating: “The doctors’ words didn’t fit me properly.”  She discredited these impersonal, offensive terms because they contradicted her own subjective experience: “I felt my body was right for me…Whole, complete, functional.”  Duffy calmly expressed her anger at others’ attempts to make her “whole,” because such attitudes disregard her own self-defined body image and feeling of completeness.  In these experiences, Duffy confronted the pervasive medical model for disability, which suggests that disability is a medical problem to be treated or eliminated from the population; in contrast, the social model poses disability as subjective identity, which is socially constructed as undesirable and marginalized by political and social systems in need of change.  Duffy recalled her doctors and others talking about her as if she wasn’t there, deciding her future without her consent.  Such paternalistic voices echoing in Duffy’s head were internalized, she explains, turning the performance into a coming out and claiming of the right to be seen as a political subject and a sexual being.  She also expressed frustration with herself for previously giving in, for remaining invisible and silent, asserting: “I wasn’t able to talk back.”  In this act of talking back, Duffy performed personal and social resistance.

Duffy’s self-exhibition is disarming and transgressive.  It removes the defenses of the performer and her audience, simultaneously.  Duffy’s image recalls the Venus de Milo, an epitome of Western ideals for female beauty; yet her body in live performance defies social standards of appearance acceptability.  The performance alters perceptions of the body in representation and in society, as it links histories of female and disabled bodies on display.  I will place Duffy’s performance in dialogues with images of the female body drawn from histories of art, photography, and the freak show, arguing that languages of disability, such as those Duffy exposes, condemns, and re-invents, may tell alternative and potentially liberating narratives of representation.  I characterize these images as Venuses to exhibit how the Venus tradition recycles across visual media and historical contexts and embodies confusions of conventional and anti-conventional (i.e. subversive) forms of representation.  Venuses display body ideals, as well as deviance.  Because the Venus tradition is tied specifically to histories of representing the “other,” my comparisons show how disability studies perspectives have been informed by and contribute to issues of race, gender, class, and sexuality in body criticism.   Using Duffy’s performance as a model, I read comparative images against the grain of, or in opposition to, repressive narratives of disability and of representation to disrupt them and to empower the subjects on display – the disarmed “others” – with performative agency, as these Venuses gaze and talk back. 

Duffy inserts her body into the tradition of the female nude from its Classical Western foundations, challenging body ideals.  Her body recalls the Classical marble sculpture of the armless Venus de Milo, whom viewers often accept as a broken relic.  Art historian Kenneth Clark (1956) has called the Venus de Milo the greatest work of antiquity, arguing that such models set the precedent of ideal beauty throughout art history, as well as for other forms of visual culture. Therefore, the Venus figure reappears across various art historical periods and visual media as an ideal, which proves to be intricately deceptive.  The Venus becomes a generic trope that aestheticizes and justifies voyeuristic and often problematic exploitations of the body, specifically through conventions which stage a female body as sexually available and complacent with her display, as the model becomes an object for visual consumption.

Predominant feminist theories of representation, drawn from psychoanalytic theories surrounding identity formation and looking at the “other,” argue that the female nude represents not a real woman, but rather “Woman” as set of formal conventions – a symbol always mediated by the heterosexual, patriarchal gaze.  Marina Warner (1985) explains that women in representation, from the earliest myths and histories, are conventionally ascribed meaning rather than empowered to make meaning, and that an image of a man is more often considered a portrait of a specific individual, whereas women’s bodies are viewed as symbolic or as objects of fantasy. This “Woman” in representation is an image of what the male creator lacks; she is objectified in the process of the assumed male viewer defining himself as everything she is not and in his potential dominance over and possession of her. “A re-presented woman is always a copy of a copy; the ‘real’ (of) woman cannot be represented because her function is to re-present man.  She is the mirror and thus never in it” (Phelan 1993, 101).   In other words, the image of “Woman” represents the desires and subjectivity of those who produce it, rather than expressing anything about the identity of the body on display.  Relating to Classical ideals and modern psychoanalytic elaborations, the female body in representation is castrated to confirm the image-producer’s masculinity, and therefore without her own agency (Mulvey 1975 & Berger 1972). Thus, the Venus de Milo may be the ultimate representation of the female form, always lacking in some of the most visible body parts, visually and metaphorically disarmed.  Duffy’s defiantly subjective performance brings to life how the female form is always already impaired in its symbolic disempowerment and amputation, as she disables the ideal. 

Duffy’s performance also disables theoretical notions of the gaze.   Due to pervasive voyeurism, women and the disabled are objects of often exploitative gazes.  Similarly to how representations of “Woman” eclipse the experience of real women, disability studies theorists have argued that pervasive representations in culture produce restrictive and stereotypical images of disability and affectively erase disabled people as political and social subjects.  According to such notions, visual images are largely oppressive and disabling.  Disability studies theorist Rosemarie Garland-Thomson articulates eloquently the connections between the theoretical gaze and the stare – a pervasive, tangible gaze that disabled individuals confront on a daily basis, such as Duffy asserts in her confrontations with the public and their questions.  The visibly disabled body is constantly on display, Garland-Thomson explains, and subject to a diagnostic gaze, which asks “what happened” to the body.  This stare distances the viewer from the body he/she sees, constructing the disabled individual as inferior “other,” and in opposition, assures the viewer’s sense of “normalcy.”  In her equation, Garland-Thomson troubles ideas that the gaze functions on heterosexual desire, for disabled people are stereotypically represented as a-sexual and disability is considered undesirable in general; in contrast, the stare is informed by and circulates medical models for disability. 

I adopt many of the similarities between the gaze and stare that Garland-Thomson articulates, yet I see more dimensions, particularly as they operate in visual culture.  Garland-Thomson argues, for example, that photographs of the disabled provide a medium for the viewer to stare at a photographically produced “other,” maintaining further that whereas live performances by disabled artists, such as Duffy, allow for progressive self-representation and returned stares, photographs foreclose any dynamic exchange between the viewer and the body on display (2000, 334-8). I extend her notions to interpreting two-dimensional images, such as photographs and paintings, which I see as potentially performative.  As performance theorist Peggy Phelan (1993) insists, seeing is necessarily social and the gaze is reciprocal, such that looking at the exterior “other,” in life and in various forms of visual culture, entails a simultaneous gaze inward, as well as a simultaneous returned gaze from the “other.” Looking at the “other,” for example a disabled individual,  may be an attempt to define the self by confirming the viewer’s able-bodied “normalcy,” destabilizing notions of difference and distance between the viewer and the image.  Further, one who looks is always caught in the act and subject to potentially transformative reactions,. In a recent article, Garland-Thomson, in reference to visual images brought about by technologies in the nineteenth-century, states: “This kind of mediation changes the living staring encounter in several ways; first, it absolves the starer of the responsibility to the object of the stare; second, it eliminates the possibility of engagement between the two people in the staring relationship; third, it grants all agency to the looker and withdraws any agency from the looked upon; fourth, it renders the confrontation static.  In short, virtual staring evacuates any dynamism from a lived encounter” (Fall 2005, np).  I engage in these ideas of reciprocal, dynamic gazes and stares in looking at a series of disarming Venus images in order to show their potential for feminist praxis in the realm of disability performance.

Contemporary photographer Joel Peter Witkin’s First Casting for Milo (2004) showcases how the Venus figure emerges across genres of visual culture.  Witkin’s work is controversial in his use of specifically anti-conventional, anti-idealized bodies in excessive and taboo displays.  One of his fascinations is amputees, as featured in this black and white photograph of a woman with unique, fingerless hands, posing on a stage in seductive lingerie and partially shrouding drapery.  The photograph captures the shimmering and luscious surfaces of this exotic beauty and her theatrical surroundings.  This amputee Venus is a corporeal and symbolic beauty; she is a historical Classical sculpture in her first “casting,” a term that enters into the languages of sculpture and theater.  The amputee is also “cast” as a Hollywood starlet, emphasized by her classical Hollywood coiffed hair, period bra, and the clichéd film slate and clapboard in the margins.  She poses like a statue and silent film star, with specific reference to the Venus de Milo.  The inclusion of a dog echoes conventional iconography in portraiture painting, in which the dog is an illusive symbol of a female subject’s sexuality, domestication, morality, and/or dominance over subordinate creatures.  The dog is already a multivalent symbol in art history, and Witkin adds an additional, comic layer, for this “first casting” is, indeed, for Milo – a name that may refer to the dog rather than the female model.  Confusions of iconography and genre drive the image and destabilize the viewer’s assumptions when staring at disability.  Further, Witkin’s image is unconventional as a photographic portrait of a glamorous woman with exotic hands – a vision of desire for multiple gazes.  Witkin’s photograph, like Duffy’s performance, inserts the disabled body into a dubious history of Venuses and starlets, yet it provides the female model a stage on which to perform as an object of desire. 

First Casting for Milo adds dimensions to gazing and staring at disability.  Garland-Thomson (2001) and disability studies theorist and photographer David Hevey (1992) have criticized photographs of visibly disabled people for directing the gaze toward and fetishizing impaired body parts (in this case, her unique hands), providing a medium that sanctions a problematic social stare.  Yet, voyeurism is inherent to the medium of photography in general and a power which may be employed for subversion.  Witkin’s staging of this amputee in the guise of multiple Venuses invites the stare to her so-called deformed hands, yet places them and the rest of her body in a context of theatrical enchantment and erotic imagery.  It freezes in two dimensions the visual experience of staring at her hands, yet it also gives the viewer an excess of visual context and an excess of other visual pleasures to consume.  The photograph causes viewers confusion about their own positions in their acts of looking.  This image contains alternative narration, as it documents a potentially transgressive, perhaps self-empowering masquerade for the amputee model.

Witkin’s and Duffy’s performances of/as Venuses contend with many voyeuristic displays of the female body.  Disability and performance theorist Petra Kuppers states about Duffy’s work: “By using the idiom of the Greek ideal body, Duffy both points to the violence the Western gaze has perpetuated on women – using incomplete bodies to signify ultimate female beauty – and the ableist aesthetic that makes that reading possible, an aesthetic that sees ‘without arms’ as broken, incomplete and passive.” (2003, 52). Kuppers here locates the violence of representation in an “ableist aesthetic,” such that conventional (i.e. non-disabled) biases project metaphors of violence and tragedy onto disabled bodies in cultural images and in everyday life.  This passage calls to mind Frida Kahlo’s colorful painting, The Broken Column (1944), a self-portrait that stages the artist, in a Venus-like pose, revealed from the waist up (partially veiled by Classical drapery), pierced by nails, and encircled by bounding straps.  This corset refers also to a body brace Kahlo sometimes wore due to impairments incurred from a bus accident at the age of 18.  Kahlo is known for her numerous self-portraits, many of which graphically depict the repercussions of her disfiguring accident, including several miscarriages.  Kahlo’s torso is split open to reveal a fractured spine or imposing crumbling staff that is significantly a Classical ionic column and a phallic symbol.  The traditions of the Venus and other representations of the female body break Kahlo’s body apart both literally and metaphorically, in an image that has been related to her many surgeries, her “broken” body, and the mythology surrounding her accident, in which she was supposedly impaled by a steel rod in a pseudo-rape (Herrera 1983). Such narratives of dismemberment and violence may be confounded problematically with the assumed tragedy of disability – the nails seen as martyrdom for the inflicted subject.  Yet the wounds may also suggest the female body’s invasion by phallic or patriarchal systems themselves, as Kahlo’s body is impaled by the symbol of structural stability for Western culture.  Kahlo might be disabled and bounded by standards that discriminate against her “broken” and mixed-race body, as well as the continuous struggles she faced with her health and the restrictive environments of early twentieth-century Mexico.  Kahlo, like Duffy, engages medical imagery (Lomas 1993), a subject she specifically incorporated in her self-portraits, and she shares with Duffy an intensely personal medical (here surgical) history.  Kahlo’s multi-referential images of her body, like Duffy’s, perform a multidimensional identity that extends beyond her physical dismemberment.  Her returned gaze, albeit clouded by tears, addresses the viewer in a bold and deviant display of her anti-conventional body and its multiple histories. 

Such performative stagings turn the Venus tradition inside out and expose its conventions as deceptive.  Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863), modeled after Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1538) and now itself a canonical masterpiece, subverted the Venus tradition, by calling attention to its inherent corruptions.  Both works present the unclothed female body in an odalisque pose within a private room; however a decorate chaise in Titian’s painting and an a beguiling modeled, Rubenesque body is replaced in Manet’s version with a thinner and aesthetically flatter body, adorned with a suggestive flower in her hair, necklace, and high heeled shoes, on a bed, within a space that rejects traditional, illusionistic depiction of three-dimensional space and effectively pushes the naked body foreword, into the viewer’s space.  Further, Olympia was recognized as a modern prostitute rather than a strategically ambiguous and anonymous Venus, as in Titian’s artful display of the nude.  Art historian Timothy J. Clark maintains that Olympia deviated from norms for representing the female nude in art history, as she broke social codes for femininity and class.   The shocking qualities of the painting resulted from the nakedness and performative agency of her body, versus the conventionalized notion of a passive, artistic nude.  The bodily transgressions of Olympia emerged in painterly hints at pubic hair and an aggressive hand covering her sex, or perhaps masturbating, as well as her confrontational returned gaze.  Olympia subversively quoted the conventionalized original, pointing to the fact that the model of Titian’s painting was likely also a “courtesan,” rather than a generic nude or domesticated lover.  In dialogue with Olympia, the Venus of Urbino proves erotic, perhaps pornographic despite her conventional, passive pose, so-called demure hand shielding herself, and placement against a mythical landscape and in an upper-class boudoir (with inclusion of a chest that signifies her promise to marriage).  Focusing on Titian’s painting, art historian Rona Goffen (1997) explains how such iconography surrounding the female nude in art, even (or especially) in the most conventional of representations, is necessarily contradictory.  Others have framed the work as disarming in its illusionistic depiction of skin (Pardo 1997), as conventions that mediate the female body on display fail to contain connotations of the flesh.

Olympia proved most transgressive in her body type.  Clark postulates that Olympia “refuses to signify” (1992, 118), highlighting the formal qualities of the painting and its subversively anti-academic, modernist aesthetic.  It was her physical form, in other words, that was most disarming and subversive; Clark writes that Olympia’s “incorrectness” in rendering led viewers to remark on her “physical deformity” (116). Critics engaged languages of disability to characterize Olympia’s defiance of artistic conventions as well as her breach of class boundaries in nineteenth-century France.  Like Duffy, this Venus placed herself into a tradition while mocking it with physical departures from the norm.  Olympia, Duffy, and Kahlo destabilize their viewers due to their intense corporealities and disarming returned gazes.

These two and three dimensional performances expose how the Venus tradition has attempted to justify profoundly exploitative displays of the female body historically, as exemplified by the phenomenon of the “Hottentot Venus.”  Saartjie Baartman was taken from the “Hottentot” people of Africa’s Ivory Coast  in the nineteenth-century and put on public display in London as a savage, over-sexualized “Hottentot” Venus.  Baartman’s body on display, like Duffy’s, solicited a gaze/stare tainted with desire and repulsion, for she was staged as monstrous and classified as part ape in contemporary scientific and racist discourse.    Like Duffy, Baartman was victimized by science and medicine.  The “Hottentot Venus” became a medical specimen/erotic spectacle that was racially, sexually, and brutally objectified under the guise of scientific objectivity: posthumously, Baartman was dissected and her remains were placed on display in the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, until only recently (Fausto-Sterling 1995, 20).   The “Hottentot Venus” illustrates a manipulation of the Venus tradition, used to mediate objectification and violence against the female body.

Public displays and numerous illustrations of Baartman’s body crossed genres of medical, artistic, and popular (spectacle and pornographic) imagery, such that the Hottentot Venus was constructed by multiple gazes and stares.  Historian Sander Gilman (1986) expounds upon how the visual image of the “Hottentot” became an iconic symbol for all black women as hypersexual, primitive, and monstrous.   Gilman draws comparisons to popular images and the inclusions of ambiguous black figures in paintings such as Olympia.  Visual representations of Baartman portrayed her deviance physiognomically in profile exaggerations of her “Hottentot” physique (excessive, or more ample than “normal,” i.e. White Victorian, derriere and genitals).  Gilman argues this image of deviance served as an example against which Victorian culture established their identities as normal and civilized.  Parallels may be drawn to Duffy’s experiences of being “othered” by medical and social gazes to affirm the normalcy of those who stare. 

This comparison links racist and ableist discourses further, for Baartman’s “abnormality,” like Olympia’s, was framed through languages of disability (Garland- Thompson 1987). Baartman, and the black women she represented, were deemed abnormal and thus pathologically deviant based on the evidence of “deformed” anatomy.  Images of her fetishized her so-called abnormal body parts in pseudo-objective, scientific renderings, similarly to the charges waged by Heavy on fetishizing images of disabled individuals.  Staring at and objectifying such body parts proves laden with anything but objectivity.  Phrenologist and eugenicist Cesare Lombroso and Guglielmo Ferrero (1893/2004) argued that genital differences, or specifically “deformities,” in Hottentots were characteristic of less evolved races and degenerate criminal types.  Baartman’s so-called impairments, perhaps not so impairing in the eyes of the heterosexual, patriarchal gaze, were the visual evidence of a deviant woman.  Gilman argues that such “deviant” characteristics, supposedly displayed in anatomy, extended to black women, lesbians, and prostitutes, those who deviated from the norms of the society in power and subverted the ideals it held, specifically by their bodily appearances and acts.  Interrogating the “Hottentot Venus” through lenses of disability adds layers of significance, as images of Venuses throughout history become more disarming in comparison.

Contemporary African-American photographer Renée Cox employs disarming self-exhibition, similarly to Duffy, as she performs in her photographs as female personas drawn from art history and popular culture (the Madonna, Olympia, and a superhero, for examples), many of which are pseudo-pornographic.  Cox’s images parody long histories of exploitation, eroticization, and visual stereotyping of the black female body specifically, in excessive poses of sexual availability.  In Hottentot 2000 (2000), Cox impersonates the “Hottentot Venus” in a profile view (a physiognomic trope), which accentuates her curves, made exaggeratedly theatrical with the use of prosthetics – costume breasts and buttocks that mimic the debasing reduction of woman to tits and ass.  The image calls attention to the contrived nature of her historical model and showcases historian Anne Fausto-Sterling’s (1995) argument that the “Hottentot Venus” was and still is pure image – a complete fabrication in historical imagination and significance.  Therefore, images of the “Hottentot Venus” provide no information about Baartman as a historical individual, but rather, they depict the abusive desires of her spectators.  Perhaps problematically, Cox’s version erases the violence embedded in its nineteenth-century precedents.  Embodying the “Hottentot Venus,” Cox makes Baartman more human, recognized as a contemporary social subject in a color photograph, and so affirmatively “Cox” in her made up hair and face, which returns an assertive gaze.  Simultaneously, Cox’s costumed version disarmingly portrays Baartman as pure persona and cultural myth.  Cox constructs a Hottentot likeness that attempts to mock those who produced and consumed such images, yet fails to give Baartman a voice to talk back.

Cox, posing as a historical freak and contemporary photographic spectacle, interrogates the potential agency, as well as dangers, of exhibitionism.  The history of freak displays raises a variety of parallels between cultural forms of objectifying certain “abnormal” bodies – raced, disabled, and hyper-sexualized, for examples, and provides a wealth of visual materials that produced those bodies as “others.”  During their heyday of popular entertainment in the United States (c. 1840-1940), freak show displays and the numerous two-dimensional images generated from them exploited the gaze/stare at disability.  The freak show functioned on and magnified the status of disabled people as social outcasts.  Carte de visites of freak show performers, postcard-sized collectible photographs, became wildly popular during the late nineteenth-century.  Among politicians, war heroes (many amputees), obscene attractions, and celebrities, freak show performers became public personalities in their carte de visite images – armless wonders in particular would often autograph them with a footprint.  The most famous showman of all time, P.T. Barnum, hired photographers to produce marketing and souvenir portraits of his casts of human curiosities.  With particular relevance to the theme of disarming Venuses, Ann E. Leak-Thompson was one of many amputees staged by the freak show as armless and legless wonders, miraculous “half” people and unbelievable human torsos.  She was also featured in collectible souvenir photographs, which become part of the historical representation of disability as freakish spectacle.  In dialogue with performances of other Venuses in this paper, photographs of Leak-Thompson push further frameworks of disability as performative. 

Such publicity photographs capitalized on portraying disability as sensational and sentimental.  Examples by Charles Eisenmann purport Leak-Thompson’s morality to her patrons in their photographic compositions (Bogdan 1988). She is staged as a proper Victorian lady who performs domestic crafts, as suitable for the female social role.  The imaged is conventionalized in a black and white, nineteenth-century family portrait style, as Leak-Thompson is surrounded by props that identify and label her for the viewer and dressed in proper Victorian dress.  Specifically, the setting asserts Leak-Thompson’s status as a wife and mother, marked as extraordinary or different from the status quo by her bare feet, one holding scissors.  Repeated inclusions in her portraits of embroidery and crochet displaying Christian symbols and phrases, as well as moralistic quotes on the back of the photographs, emphasized her piety.  Yet her “normalcy” is made extraordinary.  Freak show displays commonly and condescendingly exalted disabled “freaks” for performing mundane tasks, as if the non-impaired audiences could not fathom functioning with different bodies.  Domestic settings and props, which suggested Leak-Thompson’s adaptive ability to be “normal,” allowed viewers to identify with Leak-Thompson, while her undeniably abnormal body assured distance between the non-disabled spectators and the disabled spectacle.  Her freak show biography, characteristically a hybrid of medical diagnosis and fantastical myth, emphasized that her birth defects resulted from the immorality of her parents, communicating further to the patron voyeurs that Leake-Thompson’s life took a deviant path because of the cross she had to bear in her armlessness.  Therefore, audiences were encouraged to stare, as she had no viable alternatives than to perform for them, which further appeased any guilt.  Despite efforts to normalize her, Leak-Thompson’s live and photographic performances departed from the nineteenth-century standards of social respectability, because of her profession, as well as her body. 

The freak show serves as an archive of and visual legacy for performances of disability.  It staged Leake-Thompson’s everyday life as a spectacle, relating to Duffy’s experiences of being stared at and asked inappropriate questions.  Duffy has been called a “sideshow Venus” by Garland-Thomson (2005), as she relates contemporary performance art to a these problematic historical displays.  Garland-Thomson underscores that Duffy’s masquerade as the Venus de Milo, freak show, and medical spectacles is revisionist.  Yet viewing disability as performative, as in the photograph of Leake-Thomson and other visual images, raises complicated issues, for performing, in the experiences of people with disabilities, may be an obligation and burden and/or a tool and exercise of agency.  Questions surrounding the ultimate consequences of self-exhibition are particularly layered for those who are always already on social display, while simultaneously politically invisible; yet in Duffy’s example, performance becomes a means to re-invent the self and inhabit both liberating and oppressive historical images and narratives of disability.  Through her performative work, we may transgressively re-interpret convention and unpack historical representation, in a re-vision of art history.  Part of this interventionist work involves looking closer, staring, seeing from multiple perspectives, and disarming the conventional staging, as well as the conventional reading, of images.  Feminist theory of representation and feminist forms of embodied demonstration set the stage for Duffy’s activism.

Today, and until Spring of 2007, citizens of London and its many visitors can step right up to the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square to stare up at a 11 ½ foot tall, 13 ton sculptural portrait of London resident, the amputee wonder Alison Lapper.  Lapper agreed to being cast by British artist Marc Quinn when she was 7 months pregnant and to have her nude image carved in Italian marble and put on public display; many have called the piece a collaboration. This prominent display constructs a body (pregnant and disabled), which is assumed, or rather, socially preferred to be kept private, and stages that body into a public performance.  Lapper, placed on a pedestal among statues of imperialist naval captains (most prominently, Lord Nelson atop his column and surrounded by lions), has been called a contemporary heroine of cultural diversity.  Deemed by some as “brave and bold” and “pregnant and proud” and by others as a tasteless and overtly political publicity stunt for Quinn, the work makes a public statement about disability and Lapper’s right to be seen, like Duffy, as a social subject and sexual being.  Perhaps due to controversy, the sculpture has brought global attention to Lapper’s body and her life story; she is a product of social services for the disabled, now single mother, and an artist who makes nude, photographic self-portraits.  Lapper’s own artistic interests in the human figure once focused on non-disabled bodies, as was the norm in art schools, until she was challenged to confront her body, both in her life and in her artwork.  She was inspired to come out and show herself socially and artistically by none other than a photograph of the Venus de Milo.  Now Lapper, as a Venus, stares back at Nelson and the colonizing, patriarchal values that the monument signifies.  Lapper has stated about the sculpture: 'I regard it as a modern tribute to femininity, disability and motherhood” (http://www.fourthplinth.co.uk/). Lapper recognizes how her body becomes a monument to and for bodies and identities that have been devalued, marginalized, and exploited.  Specifically, women, mothers, and disabled people have all been historically excluded from public life, and this work, in Lapper’s words, is a feminist act that forwards the disability rights movement.  Inserting their images into a feminist theory and visual history, Lapper and Duffy sculpt new languages and representations for disability in the public eye.

ENDNOTES