In Greek mythology, Medusa was considered so hideous that a person would turn to stone at the mere sight of her. This was a result of a curse by Athena, who was enraged at the defiling of her sacred temple by Medusa’s act of sex (or of being raped according to other sources) in it. To defeat Medusa, Athena gave the hero Perseus, a polished shield acting as a mirror in which to see her, to neutralise the impact of the direct assault of her appearance on the/his gaze. Perseus then chopped off Medusa’s head and put it in a magic bag to cover it, unveiling it only to use it as a weapon until he finally gave it to Athena who then used Medusa’s face and hide/skin to fashion her own shield.

A disabled body¹ in our culture has often been looked at as ‘freak’, ‘abnormal’, or a monster figure like Medusa. Lennard Davis explains disability as a “disruption in the visual, auditory, or perceptual field as it relates to the power of the gaze (1997: 53).” And so I’ve taken the title of the paper from an exhibition curated by Amanda Cachia, ‘Medusa’s Mirror: Fears, Spells & Other Transfixed Positions’ in Oakland, 2011, in which disabled artists reclaim the agency of the gaze that they have traditionally been subject to by challenging the frameworks of their able-bodied viewer². For the purpose of this essay, I’d like to look at the work of two of the artists from this exhibition, Katherine Sherwood and Laura Swanson (though not necessarily the work displayed in it), and the work of Japanese artist, Mari Katayama, in an attempt to engage with my own self-portraits in an exercise in self-reflection. My purpose is twofold and is fundamentally premised on desire. Looking at the self-representations of these four artists including myself, I want to firstly examine, how our bodies as a disruption in the visual field invites an illicit gaze or ‘staring’ as Garland-Thompson calls it, that registers the body as aberrant (2002: 56) and how this wanting to look but also wanting to look away translates into a disruption in the psychic field of the observer. Secondly, I’d like to position the Self as this observer, and then how one’s own body is understood, addressed, and represented. I’m using here a psychoanalytical view alongside the social-construction model used widely by disability scholars and activists, the latter believing that while impairment is situated in the pathological body understood through the medical model, disability is primarily a social phenomenon that is brought about by an unequal relationship between body and environment i.e. disability located in a society built for non-disabled people, for example, written text in front of a blind person or the many art galleries and spaces with railing-less staircases in front of me.

Objects of Desire: The Anomalous Body in an Ocularcentric³ Era

In the modelling reality TV show for disabled women, ‘Britain’s Missing Top Model’, which aired in 2008, the first episode called ‘Objects of Desire’, invited the eight participants to pick any object that they felt represented them. Tellingly, three out of them picked a handheld mirror, one model going so far as to break her mirror with a hammer for a fragmented reflection. The others picked a make-up box, a perfume bottle, a jewelled bracelet, a riding crop and a crucifix pendant. The show was disbanded after the first season due to a controversy claiming that it made a spectacle out of disability.

But isn’t disability always a spectacle? Arguing its performative aspect as ‘invisible theatre’, more than just being the embodied experience that has been established, Sandahl & Auslander point out that though disability is a ubiquitous phenomenon of human experience (we all are disabled in some way and age catches up), “people with visible impairments almost always seem to ‘cause a commotion’ in public spaces (2005: 2).” Whether it is the anomaly in their movements that disrupts the flow of public activity or a difference registered in our visual expectation of the ‘normal’ body, it elicits surprise, fear, or mere curiosity and a response to gather as much visual information to make sense of it which one would call, ‘staring’. Garland-Thompson has theorised this ‘staring’ as a kind of looking that “choreographs the visual relation between spectator and spectacle”, in effect, emphasising the difference of the disabled body from the norm instead of just treating it as another variant of human form. This creates a power dynamic between the able-bodied gaze and disabled subject (2002: 57).

Davis accounts for the registering of this difference psychoanalytically, by employing Freud’s ‘spaltung’ or ‘splitting’ in which the infant when not satisfied with the parent, deems them ‘bad’ or when it is satisfied understands them as ‘good’ until they develop enough to understand that the same parent has good and bad parts. It is this primitive instinct on a social level that causes culture to split bodies into absolute categories of ‘good’ and ‘bad’, as a measure to repress the original psychic state of a fragmented Self and reinforce the developmental fiction of the ‘wholeness’ of the body (1997: 53-4). In Lacanian terms, the infant first sees itself as fragmented− an assemblage of various body parts, the representation/images of which he calls imagos, among which are “castration, mutilation, dismemberment, dislocation… bursting open of the body (60).” In the Mirror stage⁴ the infant that like the disabled body lacks motor ability, misrecognises the unified image in the mirror as itself creating a hallucination of wholeness. The societal discomfort with disability, Davis thus contends, is because such bodies serve as a ‘mirror’ or imago in which one recognises one’s own repressed essentially fragmented self− “rather than seeing the object of desire, as controlled by the Other, the subject sees the true self of the fragmented body (60).” Julia Kristeva calls this an opening of a “narcissistic identity wound” in which the non-disabled are threatened with “psychic or physical death, the fear of falling apart” as imagos of castration and also “the angst of seeing the boundaries of the human species itself fall away (2010: 251).”

Artist, Mari Katayama⁵, in a way challenges this ‘narcissistic identity wound’ of the non-disabled viewer/voyeur by resisting the idea of the disabled body’s inability to be seen as desirable because of a ‘lack’. She works primarily in the medium of photography to create self-portraits with elaborately staged opulent sets and costumes, quite obviously referencing fashion photography. In “bystander #001” (fig. 1) her body is provocatively bent in a V formation and a number of cushion fabric limbs seem to grow from perhaps her centre but their entanglement makes it hard to tell. This gives her an appearance of a crab− a recurring motif in her work. Or perhaps a spider is a more accurate resemblance, as she seems suspended from the ceiling or rather the floor that we know to be vertically inverted, the strange perspective of which gives her a sense of fixity yet at a risk of falling. But it is the multiplicity of her limbs− almost like fractals− that makes the image of her poised frame disturbing. Her work definitely employs a certain Japanese cyberpunk aesthetic of mutated and technologically enhanced yet hyper-sexualised cyborg bodies to draw attention to her own use of prosthetic limbs. The title, ‘bystander’ itself suggests a certain witnessing of a performance− perhaps the performance of disability in this case. She arrests us with her half-shut kohl-rimmed eyes and parted lips, inviting our gaze to rest upon her body, but a gaze not stemming from a fear or repulsion driven curiosity. She wants us instead, to look at her body as an object of desire− a ‘Venus’⁶, as one would call it in the art historical tradition.

The myth of Medusa, Davis contends, is a necessary counter in the Venus tradition to establish the dichotomy between “beauty and ugliness, desire and repulsion, wholeness and fragmentation (1997: 55)”, thereby the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ body. The rejection of the ‘un-desirable’, ‘im-perfect’, non-Venus bodies is therefore not merely psychoanalytical, but very much a historical practice (at least in the context of Western society). But Venus herself was born from the genitals of Uranus that fell into the sea; the desirable female thus being a direct product of masculine castration. It is equally important to note that the Venuses (sculptures) from antiquity come down to us in a dismembered, fragmented and often headless (decapitated like Medusa if you will) state that is seen as an erotic ‘whole’ through the polished mirror (and protective shield) of the art historian, setting the beauty standards of a perfectly sculpted body⁷.

“In our ocularcentric era, images mediate our desires and the ways we imagine ourselves,” (Garland-Thomson, 2002: 57) conveying a certain cultural beauty norm that when consumed, increase our awareness of our own bodies as images, mirrors, and something to be looked upon, particularly in the case of women. Other image technologies for example, the selfie cam in a phone, have amplified the function of a mirror resulting in sight being the primary sense through which we physically experience ourselves The models that we constantly look at are offered as objects of desire, something that one would want to be or/and something one would want to have. For women this has resulted in a number of body projects, sold by a capitalist society as a way to bridge the difference between their own bodies and their desirable ideals. The promotion posters of the beauty pageant for ‘Britain’s Missing Top Model’ previously mentioned, would be a clear example of this, where though most of the contestants had a visible impairment (excluding two who were hearing impaired), there was a minimal ‘disruption in the visual field’ and all their bodies fit the white-slim-sexy body type (no fits, drool or ‘abnormal’ body formation) which could be identified with by able-bodied audiences as well (Rice, 2014). The resulting effect is that these perfect body ideals are internalised such that any variation is immediately regarded as different or more strongly, the undesirable ‘other’, perhaps as a defence against recognising variations within ourselves.

In the politics of its visual rhetoric, photography− the most pervading image form in our times− defines both ideal and aberrant. It enables and even authorises “staring” or the gaze in all its forms, be it desirous, covetous or curious. In its tendency to objectify, photography of the disabled subject has often been seen as a modern form of the display of disability from its long history of being exhibited in circuses, entertainment halls, medical theatres etc. as ‘exotic’, ‘freaks’, ‘monsters’, and the like. It is in the realm of the exotic⁸ then, that Katayama exhibits her own anomalous body in an act of self-representation which shows us how to view it− inverting the visual dynamics of the subject object relationship.

Holding the same power of self-representation, artist Laura Swanson, chooses instead to critique the ‘exotic’ exhibitionist mode by placing her body in the mundane setting of ordinary life in a more ‘realistic’ fashion, in much of her oeuvre. Unlike Katayama, Swanson is more interested in staging herself in domestic spaces, like in her first series, ‘Sitcoms and Romcoms’ that “critically examines the ways in which popular culture instils mainstream notions of “normal life” and marginalizes those who don’t fit in with that construct.⁹” Her series, ‘Anti-Self-Portraits’, push the boundary further where she stages herself in the intimate space of the home, playing on our voyeuristic curiosity of the private lives of individuals, especially disabled people to know how they function in ‘real life’. The obscuring of her face disallows the satisfaction of a stable identity, making a wry comment on subjectivity of the individual as separate from “the body as a visual object (that) others can consume with their eyes.” Ironically, the issues she tackles here sounds strikingly similar to those experienced by celebrities whose bodies are seen as desirable. I’d thus like to draw particular attention to the work, ‘Peggy Lee’, (fig. 2) from the series.

There’s a certain vintage aesthetic to this photograph from the colours to the speakers to the vinyl record covers that frame Swanson’s figure. The composition is vertically divided perfectly in half by her body in casual wear, bang in the centre, which leaves barely any space between her and the top and bottom edges of the frame. In this claustrophobic home space, everything from the shelf on the left, to the speakers on either side of her, to the boxes and trays to the right, is stacked vertically. Perhaps it is our obsession with the vertical and our desire for the tall body that she critiques here. But more than this, what makes us really uncomfortable is the full frontal gaze of celebrity singer, Peggy Lee, who stares at us on the cover of her music album along with three other faces on the cover of theirs. There is a definite troubling of our gaze in turn, that cannot rest easy on this photograph because an impossible duality has been established between the Swanson’s body and the ideal beauty of Peggy Lee’s head that Swanson uses to hide her own. The artist makes it clear in her interview that hiding is not about the insecurities of the body but the psychological process of “looking and being looked at.” In effect, she uses the ‘desirable’ image of the other as a mask.

Unmasking Desire: Armour, Amour, and the Anomalous Body

Speaking on photography, Lacan sees the camera as standing in for the gaze− the embodiment of light− through which one is “photo-graphed¹⁰”. This two-dimensional photograph functions like a mirror or screen through which the self is constituted by being made visible to itself. He hence acknowledges the formative role of visual images in shaping the identity of the subject in the symbolic order. The human subject or the “subject of desire that is the essence of [wo]man”, conscious of being looked at in his waking state plays with these “cast-off media skins” i.e. masks, photographs, paintings as mediating screens in which it “maps” the positionality for the self and the “other.” “[Wo]man, in effect, knows how to play with the mask as that beyond which there is a gaze. The screen is here the locus of mediation (as cited in Ruth, 1997: 51).” If one is to postulate that in an ocularcentric era, visual images, much like the mirror, are instrumental in constituting the socialised self, my objective then is to understand how the disabled body perceives its own subject-hood and self as an ‘object of desire’ through the locus of mediation (in this case, paintings) created by the body itself of itself.

For this purpose, I’d like to start by looking at the series, ‘Venuses of the Yelling Clinic’ by artist, Katherine Sherwood, primarily because she is likely to disagree with the disabled as fragmented body that we’ve discussed thus far and also because she doesn’t quite refer to the series as self-portraits or representations, but admits one could possibly read it that way. Her intention was to represent diverse disabilities (and races) through her series as a tribute to disabled women− proud and strong− and yet, she chooses the form of the traditionally objectified and disempowered art-historical nude to do so. Though she provides identifiable markers of their disability like white canes, prosthetic, leg braces etc. like Swanson, she denies us the satisfaction of their facial identity by masking it with an image of her own brain scan adorned by fractal headdresses fashioned from 16^th to 20^th century western imagery of the brain, that appears haunting in its skull-like resemblance− a skeletal anomaly to the fleshy figures. For me, this is a very important act as in this ‘mask’ of her own brain− the source of creativity and of disability− as the figure’s face with a direct frontal gaze, the artist performs her presence by claiming the iconic nude body as her own. Additionally, the paintings are done on the repurposed backs of canvases with reproductions of the works of almost all male masters. By leaving intact the pencilled in names of the masters on the canvases, in a way she “refract(s) art history through the lens of disability¹¹.” These pieces (or fragments, if one would like to push the imagination) were stitched together as one whole surface on which this painting is done− the disabled Venus acting almost as a mask over an ableist art history.

The figure in her painting, ‘Olympia’ (fig. 3) from the series, has been taken from Manet’s painting of the same name which created scandal at the time for its bold representation of a prostitute in the conventional pose of the nude like in Titian’s ‘Venus’, but without the garb of a mythological subject that had enabled this art historical tradition of female objectification, save in the irony of its title. Sherwood’s Olympia is however, devoid of any surrounding clutter of symbolic imagery and reclines on her bed of brightly coloured patterned fabric. One leg rests upon the other but is in a leg brace that Sherwood identifies as her own which is used to lock the ankle to assist in walking in case of weakness in surrounding muscles. I know from experience, that a heeled slipper like in this painting, cannot be walked in with this orthosis and would therefore be shown here for a purely aesthetic purpose.

The history of high heels is an interesting one− used by men during the opulent times of the French court, rejected for their non-functionality during the Enlightenment, and finally coming to be associated with women’s sexuality after their use in Victorian pornographic images. Sherwood thus positions her figure of the disabled woman somewhere in between the aggressive sexuality of Manet’s Olympia and the passive desirability of nudes, claiming her agency to move between both registers. The ‘nude’ itself in art, has always been “a set of idealized conventions on how a body is supposed to look” rather than a literal representation of an actual body (Davis, 1997: 55-9). It is then, an assemblage of many idealised body parts into a conceptual whole made possible by the masculinised imagination. A classic example would be that of the artist, Zeuxis, who according to Pliny, composed his Venus figures from references to body parts of five beautiful women for his painting− a tale eerily similar to the more grotesque ‘Frankenstein’ story in which an assemblage of perfect body parts formed a monster instead.

If the body of Venus− goddess of sexuality and model object of desire− is understood as having an inherently fragmented nature, it troubles Davis’ supposition of the fear of the disabled body as the imagos of the subject’s fragmented body, but perhaps it explains the fascination. Specifically looking at sexuality and subjectivity, Margrit Shildrick extends this argument using the Foucauldian notion of pleasure and danger being intrinsic to sexuality and sexual encounters because they risk the potential loss of self into the other. The resultant anxiety, he says, is most acute in case of sexual relationships with anomalous bodies, that additionally threaten corporeal integrity by rupturing the illusion of a stable identity or whole self (2009: 84-6). In effect, the ego’s protective armour is threatened by the amour. As a consequence, the sexuality and desires of disabled people has gone largely unaddressed until very recently and is still frequently overridden by problems of accessibility, giving it little space in the social model that dominates disability discourse today. There is a mass disavowal of the sexual agency of the disabled subject(87). In this context then, to continue with the Lacanian model where in which anxiety and desire are both necessary constituents of the subject, how does the disabled subject perceive and then represent itself?

Speaking now as this subject about my own work, I suddenly find myself at awkward position in regard to this psychoanalytical framework as Davis, Kristeva, and Shildrick assume an ontological categorisation of the disabled versus the ‘normate’, as Kristeva calls it. Sure, disability is very much an embodied phenomenon but, interpellated as we are into the ableist visual regime discussed before, disabled subjects often identify with both categories, especially those in whom the onset of disability was at a later phase in life. The sway of the pervasive ableist imagination is such that one sometimes tends to register one’s own body as a disruption in one’s own visual and psychic field, opening a wound in one’s narcissistic identity. Hence there exists the desire for the able body− the seemingly whole image in the mirror− that is always laced with anxiety as “desire must always represent – in psychoanalytic terms at least – a failure of satisfaction, a lack of self-completion that exists only because the object of desire has already been lost (94).” This object, in my case specifically, which I identify with as my reflection and is yet strangely ‘other’, needs to be reclaimed through the creative act of painting it− rendering it visible and present on a surface that acts as the ‘locus of mediation.’

The surface in this self-portrait (fig. 4) is the miniaturist’s traditional wasli paper (derived from the Urdu word, ‘wasl’, meaning ‘to join’) which joins three Indian postcards into an accordion-fold plane. The resulting perspective created in the photograph of the painting, makes the figure appear warped and disproportionate. Large parts of the composition are empty, showing the marks, dirt, and fibre embedded in the paper. The figure itself lies flat on an exquisitely tiled floor painted in gouache but the delineating contour of their separation is absent as the floor pattern spreads into the fabric of the dress. Imitating the erotic Venus pose, with parted lips and hand suggestively on the chest, its longing gaze is directly upon the onlooker.

Considering that my self-portraits were never meant to make it to the public eye, who or what is this gaze towards? Since the inner workings of my unconscious that tend to reveal themselves in the process of painting a self-portrait, are unknown to me as well, I can only assume consciously, that the gaze is towards me as a self-subject engaged in a reflection on my practice. The art of miniature itself is a labour of love in the hours spent with a painting where the body, gaze and mind is locked in with it. The delicacy required of the form demands the softest touch of the brush, making the repeated gesture of stippling called ‘pardakht’, put the body in a very sensuous and erotic relationship with the surface. But pleasure here is also laced with danger as it is a back breaking practice made worse by my muscle weakness, which continues to do serious damage to my spine, requiring me− the artist-subject, to lie on the floor in breaks during painting, like the figure here. The desire then, is not just the able body, but a body in practice.

In this other self-portrait (fig 5) done on one and a half postcard covered with wasli paper and directly from my mirror image, the figure’s right hand is arrested in the act of drawing on the sheets of paper resting on her lap. The act itself freezes time within the painting of the hours of engagement with one’s reflection. It is the poise of miniature painting artist in a miniature painting. It is the threat of loss of this body in practice that is sublimated into my more public artistic concerns like the crisis of environment and the loss of the multiplicity of truths, histories, and narratives.

Transcending Desire: Reflection towards a Re-cognition

Desire of the able body in the disabled subject, I must emphasise here, does not arise out of an essential feeling of inadequacy but rather from the crisis of the self, caused by the conflict between the embodied self as understood through lived experience and the self-subject formed through the interpellation into a certain visual culture. This dialectic is certainly engaged with by all four artists presented even though their personal views on subjectivity may vary. Sherwood for example, rejects this theory of self-perception, clearly telling me that at 67 she finds herself “happily not fragmented” and even crediting her disability for her creative process. However, assuming this dialectic holds good for a decent population identifying as disabled, my intention in this section is to look at how desire and the body caught in this linguistic discourse, can be transcended visually or conceptually in the works of the artists already discussed.

In the installation of the exhibition, “you’re mine”, (fig. 6) by Katayama, a bed with many pillows is situated under a large photographic self-portrait of the artist, in which like a lingerie model in our typical reclining Venus poise, lies propped up on her elbow on a similar white bed while her other hand is seductively placed on her thigh. On this bed is a plastic model of Katayama that shares even the same fingerprint, in a similar awkward position. In place of her face though, there lies a mirror surrounded by light bulbs. According to Katayama, this is for her social self or ‘mask’ she puts on for the world which is merely a patchwork collection and reflection of other people which constructs her self-identity. Her ‘real’ self under these superficial faces, doesn’t exist. On the opposite wall, hangs a full-length mirror (fig. 7) reflecting the photograph and installation. For the exhibition, Katayama employs the myth, in which, when three doppelgangers meet in the same space, the self ceases to exist. The disabled subject then, would “disappear into the normal.¹²”

To explain this, I’d like to return to Davis’ opinion on the exultation of Venus sculptures from antiquity as the epitome of beauty which in reality, come down to us in a fragmented, broken and often headless state. He claims that Venus has a double function of both physical and spiritual model of desire and thus, the critic must go beyond or transcend the shortcomings of her physical body “to the essential body, the body of Desire, the body of the Other (1997: 60).”

In similar vein, Sherwood’s ‘Venuses of the Yelling Clinic’, share a remarkable unity in form despite the signs of disability they are endowed with which aren’t immediately noticeable− their ‘disruption in the visual field’ getting almost subsumed into the erotic familiarity of the iconic nudes. The most striking disruption here is their deliberate effacement in favour of the death-like imagery of Sherwood’s brain scan like the headless and thus identity-less bodies of the excavated Venus sculptures as an ironical counter to Medusa’s own decapitated head.

Continuing the aesthetics of domesticity and ‘self-effacement’ if one may call it that, in ‘Anti-Self-Portraits’, Swanson continues photographing the everyday as encountered by her body. In this work from the series, ‘Hope, NY’, (fig. 8) the bathroom is photographed as a private space that experiences all kinds of bodies in their most natural states yet is designed for a particular body type in which hers does not fit. The image is here of a large imposing mirror intended for all narcissistic activity away from prying eyes, in the centre of the composition over the basin. However, we see that it reflects the hook on the white wall in front of it, parts of a showerhead and the door but only a sliver of Swanson’s head, denying her the privilege of its functional purpose.

The object of reflection then, is essentially normative like the screen and images in our times, which then cannot be trusted as an impartial locus of mediation of the self and the other. The Lacanian construction of the self through recognition within the plane of the mirror then becomes inherently problematic in the case of an anomalous body. The lack of Swanson’s body in the reflective plane of the mirror, points to a larger problem of the invisibilisation of non-normative bodies from image culture itself.

I’d like to conclude this essay with two examples from my diary. The first (fig. 9) drawing has pencil line drawing of various personal objects like a bottle of perfume, a linseed oil bottle, a pencil pouch, a diary and book on the right page. The pouch props up a square mirror which is the only rendered part in the frame. The mirror reflects a part of the two bottles and similar to Swanson’s photograph, the top of the figure’s head which here has one side shaved. Stuck on the mirror is an S-shaped bindi which features in more detail on the left page across the shoulder of the figure. As implied by the bindi and the parts of the bottles in the top-right corner, this page is an inverted close-up of the mirror though it is the figure’s bottom half of the face and neck that is shown here instead. The blemishes on the mirror surface are indistinguishable from the marks on the figure’s body, particularly the identifying tracheostomy¹³ scar the throat, blurring the line between actual and perceived imperfections.

In this other drawing from the diary (fig. 10), the table with a clutter of items is spread across both pages. The objects include self-care products like the three commonly identifiable hair oil bottles, a homeopathic medicine bottle, the perfume bottle from the previous drawing, and a nail polish bottle. An empty wine bottle on the left page stands beside the round compact mirror that reflects nothing. On the right is a handheld mirror propped up inside an empty tissue roll reflecting the figure’s neck with the scar, besides the square mirror that reflects the rendered breast and hand of the figure holding a pencil in the act of drawing. Below, a pair of scissors and a comb peep from under the diary that is being drawn into, the right side on which is drawn the same feet of the bronze crucifix that we see above the square mirror in the larger drawing.

In both drawings we see that it is the artist’s body that is blemished and fragmented by the mirrors, reaffirming what we have seen in Swanson’s case that they are never impartial representations. What the mirror shows as fragments in both physical and psychological terms, must then be unified through the creative process− a fragmented subjectivity that must be reclaimed by the act of image-making. The true ‘locus of mediation’ must shift as subjectivity transcends from the mirror to the surface of self-representation. When the construction of self-hood is then determined by this surface, it offers infinite possibilities for the disabled subject to move beyond the limits of body to ultimately re-cognise and reclaim the unified self. Medusa’s subjectivity then exceeds the frame of able-bodied Perseus’ mirror shield to form instead the surface of Athena’s shield− facing battle, withstanding the sharpest pierces, and protecting nonetheless.