Reclaiming and Honoring Sins Invalid’s Cultivation of Crip Beauty

• Published in: Women's studies quarterly Vol. 46; no. 1/2; pp. 231 - 236
• Main Author: Kafai, Shayda
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Feminist Press at the City University of New York 2018; The Feminist Press; Feminist Press
• Subjects: Activism; Activist art; Attitudes toward Disabilities; Audiences; Beauty; Body Weight; Community Relations; Disability studies; Feminism; Intersectionality; PART V. “AN UNSHAMED CLAIM TO BEAUTY IN THE FACE OF INVISIBILITY”: REVISITING SINS INVALID; Patriarchy; Physical Disabilities; Racism; Sexism; Social privilege; Stress; Theater; Western culture; Womens Studies; United States > US; San Francisco California
• ISSN: 0732-1562; 1934-1520; 1934-1520
• DOI: 10.1353/wsq.2018.0018

Beauty can be expansive and rhythmic. Its standards can shift, stretching outward to include and honor all of our bodyminds. I stress can here because beauty is still imbued with overwhelming power and privilege. Despite our current feminist landscape of plurality and intersectionality, for most of us, beauty is still a place of restricted access and pain. Feminism has continued this work by exploring the sexist, racist, colonized, and sizest aspects of beauty; however, more recently, disability studies has intersected with feminism and has offered an additional lens through which we can view beauty: ableism. Ableism reinforces beauty in the most perversely subtle ways. The normatively beautiful body, we are taught, has two arms and two legs. It is proportioned, balanced, and, if anything, is hyper-nondisabled in its appearance and mannerisms. In fact, disabled models and mannequins have just recently begun to enter into our visual lexicon of what beauty can look like and although they are most necessary, they too, at times, still replicate normative depictions of what our Western culture deems beautiful.