Conclusion: (Dia)Logics of Difference

Abstract

‘Every time a disabled person puts themselves in a performance situation’, Mat Fraser says, they are ‘[…] intervening in society’s preconceptions of disability to a lesser or greater degree, whatever [it is they are] doing on stage or in public. And that’s a good thing’ (2010). In a performance situation, in particular a social performance situation, a disabled person is an unconscious-become-conscious performer with the capacity to intervene in — confirm, challenge or change — social ideas about bodies, bodily differences, identities and the dominant order of things. For Fraser, as for artists like Lakmaier, Jones, Shannon, Araniello, Williamson or Crow, this obligation to perform makes public space performance a most tempting mechanism in the pursuit of an activist aesthetics and politics. ‘Disabled performers are’, as Petra Kuppers argues, ‘often aware of the knowledges that have been erected around them: tragic, poor, helpless, heroic, struggling, etc. In the laboratory of the performance situation, these knowledges can be re-examined, and questioned again and again’ (2004: 3). This is precisely what these artists do, in the laboratory of a specific sort of performance in public space. The obligation or burden becomes an opportunity to manipulate public perceptions of disability not by presenting alternate, more appropriate images of disability but by asking people to reflect on how they, too, act as an unconscious performer, how they, too, intervene in public perceptions of disability, and how a change in their own perceptions might change the order of things.