Àger Perez Casanovas

This paper aims to examine how disability as a trope has been a constant in Modern Art practices, and to what extent this presence constituted a challenge or a reinforcement of social representations and conceptions of disability. This analysis aims to assess how those tropes can be appropriated by contemporary Disability Justice-informed artistic practices that want to challenge historical normates as the only acceptable representation of beauty. These practices - such as Carmen Papalia, Nomy Lamm or Chun-Shan (Sandie) Yi - advocate for Crip beauty and joy in the arts as a space for resistance that can lead to social changes that make space for Disabled bodyminds in the public sphere. First, we will provide some pragmatic characterization of the major concepts at play when connecting Modernisms, disability aesthetics, and contemporary Disability Justice artistic practice. This will take us back to the constructions of Classical Normates in the first century BC, with the Vitruvian man being an early manifestation of a Normate (Hamraie, 2017; Garland-Thomson, 1997, 2009), a construct that will serve as a paradigm to examine how such Normates are associated with a biopolitical impulse to trace a border between normalcy and otherness (Mitchell & Snyder, 2001), which is present in representations of the normative and the disabled body in all artistic forms - in the visual arts, but also literature and music (Straus, 2018), and in representations of the body in medical and technological disciplines. Secondly, it will be argued that the primacy of Normates in such representations experiences a shift with the rise of Modernism, where there is a centrality of Disability Aesthetics, associated with a growing interest in the disabled bodymind by avant-garde artists (Siebers, 2010; Millet-Gallant, 2010) that is palpable when revisiting the period from the lens of Critical Disability Studies (Cachia, 2020). In parallel, it is worth contextualizing how this shift coincides with a transformation in the philosophical conception of the human condition towards a focus on embodiment and flesh which finds its most explicit formulation in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body (Merleau-Ponty, 1945). Finally, I will propose that the modernist tendency towards representations of the disabled bodymind culminates in contemporary artistic movements based on Disability Justice, which wield the final blow to classical Normates by transforming the locus of representation of the non-normative bodies in the artists from a first-person stance that celebrates beauty and joy (Berne et al., 2019). However, it is relevant to consider a fundamental difference between the organizational modes of Modernist isms and contemporary Disability Justice artistic practice - in terms of the ways of socializing, producing, and distributing the arts that emerge from these very different artistic systems. In the last part of the chapter, I argue for an intrinsic and systemic difference that enables us to regulate the proximities and distances among a lineage of modernist tropes to which we can trace back disability aesthetics, and its current forms of being.

This paper examines the intersection of Crip Time and Disability Justice within the Spanish medical-industrial complex, uncovering the systemic barriers faced by disabled individuals, particularly those with chronic pain and fatigue. It argues for a paradigm shift toward more inclusive and sustainable healthcare temporalities that prioritize care, interdependence, and accessibility over efficiency and productivity. Building on the history of healthcare activism in Spain, with a focus on movements such as Marea Blanca, the paper integrates the principles of Disability Justice and Crip Theory to critique the rigid temporal structures imposed by medical institutions. These structures marginalize disabled individuals by enforcing normative timelines that fail to accommodate their lived experiences. The chapter highlights the necessity of rethinking healthcare systems to embrace temporalities that sustain well-being and challenge the austerity-driven logic of the Medical Industrial Complex. This paper analyzes Spanish healthcare settings and draws on previous experiments in Disability Justice activism for citizens living with chronic pain or chronic fatigue to envision a future of healthcare grounded in justice and sustainability. It advocates for flexible, patient-centered care models that respect and adapt to diverse temporalities. This approach proposes a shift in public healthcare policies toward long-term collective flourishing and equity.

Storytelling is a central device in cultures of resistance, which enables us to trace back such cultures to precedents in the history of literature that in turn can furnish new strategies of resistance by providing narrative tactics. This paper argues that Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story The Yellow Wallpaper develops narrative tactics of resistance which can be fruitful for contemporary Mad Pride activism and poetic practices. To do so, I borrow a Foucauldian approach to account for how Gilman challenges the psychiatric industrial medical complex in her writing. First, the story is contextualized in nineteenth-century American psychiatry, and some critical warnings on the writer’s position concerning liberation movements are offered. Subsequently, I focus on three narrative tactics of resistance deployed in The Yellow Wallpaper: (1) an indetermination of genre, (2) a tension between form and dementia, and (3) a double subjectivity in the oscillation between the pronouns “one” and “I”. Finally, the reassessment of Gilman’s writing from the lens of Disability Justice is summarized in two results: first, it strengthens the grounds of Mad Pride by imbricating it in American literary and philosophical canons and, second, it provides tactics to open spaces of resistance for contemporary authors in the movement.