Diverse bodies – Images of Disability

Reflection

Looking at the intimacy of diverse bodies

Elena Escudero Romero

Attendig conferences arises new reflections. Here, Elena Escudero Romero briefly approaches one of the many that appeared last December at the conference „Cuerpos Diversos“.

The online conference “Cuerpos diversos: Estéticas de diversidad corporal en España y América Latina en los siglos XX y XXI”, organised by Berit Callsen and Philipp Seidel (Freie Universität Berlin), took place on 2, 3 and 4 December (2021). During the sessions of the meeting, the different participants addressed the relationship between diversity -specifically the categories of Queerness and Disability- and corporeality. In this way, the contributions focused on questions such as the performances of difference, the explorations on normalisation, and the act of looking at (and self-looking at) the (one’s own) diverse body, among others.

Introducing Lorenza Böttner

In his presentation “Tras la estela de Lorenza Böttner”, the speaker David Navarro (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid) introduced the figure and work of the Chilean-German transgender artist and performer Lorenza Böttner, who suffered an accident at a young age that resulted in the loss of her arms. Navarro alluded to the exhibition “Réquiem por la norma” (2018), curated by the theorist Paul B. Preciado at the centre La Virreina (Barcelona), where the first international artistic monographic dedicated to Böttner’ s work took place.

The description of the exhibition provided by La Virreina’s official website establishes the way in which the artist’s pieces “constitutes a hymn to bodily and gender dissidence”.[i] Part of the works that Navarro referred in his presentation showed a direct desire for disruption through a thematisation of the social order that reveals itself as oppressive and violent for bodies that break away from the normative frameworks.^[ii]

In addition, Navarro mentioned other works in which the artist decides to display her own body as a way of disrupting the ableist and cisgender narrative about bodies.[iii] However, the speaker also showed other works in which the explicit subversive intention (pointed above) was no longer central. Instead, nudity and the expression of intimacy, affection, and sexuality appeared.[iv]

Navarro closed his presentation by asking to what extent the diverse body, specifically Lorenza’s, could or could not be disassociated from a reception that understood it as strictly subversive, in Navarro’s words, “are disability and the disruptive the only categories to talk about the artistic work of people with disability?”.

Questioning the gaze

As Navarro concluded his talk with these final thoughts, I kept in my mind one of Böttner’s photographs to reflect on what he asked: a horizontal photograph of Lorenza naked on the bank of a river. It showed her lying in the shade of two trees, on which she leans at the same time. In the picture, she is looking and smiling at the camera.

As I thought about this photograph, I remembered that I once went to a film forum a few years ago where a documentary about women representation in art was screened. Before the film, the organisers showed a couple of photographs, and one them portrayed a woman doing topless while sunbathing on the beach. The audience was asked about their impressions of this representation, and some of the attendants commented that the image made them to feel uncomfortable, as it evoked a voyeuristic gaze traditionally linked to a male gaze that objectified women’s bodies. Another girl said that her first reaction on seeing the photograph was, however, one of pleasure and calm, as the image aroused in her a pleasant sensation linked to the fact of contemplating a woman peacefully sunbathing.

Both referred photographs portray a naked body as the central motif of the image that is exposed to significations: that of the anonymous woman in the film forum as a sexual object, and that of Böttner as a disruptive and revolutionary body. At least, it would be worth rethinking to what extent both significations habitually occupy a space in the reception that exceeds the existence of a place from which to recognise the pleasure, affectivity, and everydayness that the body itself inhabits in the creative work.

[i] https://ajuntament.barcelona.cat/lavirreina/es/exposiciones/requiem-por-la-norma/236

[ii] https://www.wkv-stuttgart.de/index.php?eID=tx_cms_showpic&file=uploads%2Fpics%2F_MG_2520.jpg&md5=a026e04f13c374da4e37be22d42b6134e84904ad&parameters[0]=YTo0OntzOjU6IndpZHRoIjtzOjQ6IjgwMG0iO3M6NjoiaGVpZ2h0IjtzOjQ6IjYw&parameters[1]=MG0iO3M6NzoiYm9keVRhZyI7czo0MToiPGJvZHkgc3R5bGU9Im1hcmdpbjowOyBi&parameters[2]=YWNrZ3JvdW5kOiNmZmY7Ij4iO3M6NDoid3JhcCI7czozNzoiPGEgaHJlZj0iamF2&parameters[3]=YXNjcmlwdDpjbG9zZSgpOyI%2BIHwgPC9hPiI7fQ%3D%3D

[iii] https://esse.ca/sites/esse.ca/files/files/im-toutant-gauthier-12-bottner-esse-web.jpg

[iv] http://cubaescena.cult.cu/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/3.png