“To the person with the disability the disability may represent a form of castration; to the able-bodied person the sight of a disabled person may evoke the threat of castration.” Maxwell E. Cubbage and Kenneth R. Thomas discussing Freud (1988)

 

In 2008 I acquired a disability. My relationship with the identity of ‘a disabled woman’ has always been complicated. I had what’s termed an ‘acquired brain injury’, which made me lose some of my brain function. Consequently, to do something, anything at all, I have to work a lot harder than ‘normal’ people.

 

Anabl questions what disability means to me as well as reflecting on how disabled people are treated in society. My relationship with the camera is complex- I use all of my equipment one handed. It both reveals my condition whilst obscuring the reality of the emotions that I feel as a disabled person. These physical and mental limitations  are made visible through dislocated and disjointed photographs of myself and the objects around me.

My own lived experience and the allowances that I have made for able-bodied people is part of a long history of my exclusion. Over the last 35 years there has been a revolution in how disabled people are treated. Words like ‘mong’ and ‘spaz’ are no longer deemed acceptable.  I have always been interested in how Cartesian theory discusses the ‘mind-body problem’- with Descartes declaring ‘I think therefore I am’. If we are just thinking beings, is only our mind important ?. I miss my body as I remember it- being able to run, walk without a limp and not be stared at. Having two working arms can afford you freedom and independence. When I look at these images of myself, Diane Arbus’s work comes to mind. I think, “should I be in a freakshow?”