art

I've decided to create a tumblr URL for this project. Not only is it more public that way, but I also have an easier time loading images.

http://thestorieswetellourselves.tumblr.com/

The blog is not currently password protected. If I chose to create a password for this blog, I'll comment on this webpaper.

Voicing Rhetorics of Beauty

I. Rhetoric

            We talked in class about culture as disability, about how culture can disable individuals and groups. The qualities that are considered “abling” (or empowering or desirable) in a culture are only definable because of the absence of these qualities. Therefore, any created culture necessarily shuts some people out; it “teaches people what to aspire to and hope for and marks off those who are to be noticed, handled, mistreated, and remediated as falling short” (McDermott and Varenne). Modern Western culture is a culture of consumption; many of our abling judgments are based off the concept of consumption through vision (Garland-Thomson 29). Two valued abilities in our culture are the abilities to see, and the right, legitimizing ways to be seen; the ability to consume, and the ability to be consumed. In this essay, I’ll argue that beauty—as the standard to which the objects of vision and consumption are held—is disabling, that modern concepts of disability can be read as beauty, and that the conflation of these constructs can yield empowering results.

                                 Claiming the Stare: Jes Sachse and the Transformative Potential of Seeing

  We all love to look. While staring is most commonly thought of as an act to be avoided or ashamed of, Disability and Women’s Studies Scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson argues that the stare at its best actually has the potential to create new meanings and more open societies.  The stare as Thomson defines it, has the potential to help us redefine the language we use to describe each other and ourselves, create space for the often-excluded in communities, and craft our own identities. The stare is most dynamic and productive when the subject of the stare, the staree, is able to wield some control over the interaction and in doing so present their story to the starer.

The topic of women as artists is one that has been discussed many times throughout history. Linda Nochlin, art historian, once wrote an article entitled “Why have there been no great women artists?” which explored this very subject. The Guerrilla Girls added to this topic by pointing out that when most women are featured in a museum, it is for being a nude subject in a painting rather than for being the creator of the masterpiece. Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Ingres’ The Grand Odalisque, and Valie Export’s GenitalPanik are all works featuring a female nude subject. A uniting theme among them is the portrayal of the nude women as “freaks”. When a woman, especially a nude woman, is portrayed as a freak, her sexuality and her gender are seen differently.

Final Project: Comparison


      I noticed partway through this course that the concept of storytelling has actually been use in a number of the courses I have taken so for, though it has been presented in different ways and for different purposes.  I have had the experience of three separate professors in three different disciplines give me a very similar assignment.  I found that, when I looked at these pieces in conjunction with this course that they seemed much more connected than I thought they were, I was able to trace some of my own academic development through them, and the styles I used to present them clearly showed how each class biased my presentation.

Hello classmates, professors, and visitors!

As the culmination of The Story of Evolution and the Evolution of Stories, I have created a comic in dialogue with Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics that is meant to complement his work by both demonstrating how his ideas are useful and also highlighting some things that he left out of his theory of comics as a revolutionary medium.

In the 1980s, I drew weekly political cartoons and editorial illustrations for a newspaper in Pennsylvania. My predecessor there had been Signe Wilkinson, one of the few women publishing then in this area. She went on to national recognition. I did not. Some of my cartoons were quite good; most were so juvenile that I threw them away long ago.