Sister-Outsiders: Reasserting Our Voices and Bodies Through Arts-Based Research

• In Event: Pleasure Is Political: Implications of Embodied Making and Teaching for Arts-Based Research

Abstract

Young women of color with disabilities have little place in the educational system. Their voices are silenced, their bodies are stigmatized, their capacities for creating themselves as subjects in the world are suppressed. As both a teacher and an Asian-American woman with a disability, I began to question and explore not only my own status and subjectivity but also those of the adolescent African-American female students with disabilities that I have worked with. Despite the gaps in race and class that separated me from my students, I sought to locate bonds as ‘sister outsiders’ (Lorde, 1984) based on our common experiences of being disempowered within schools and society, and to re-create the damaged images I held of myself and my students due to internalizing a white male patriarchal gaze (hooks, 1992).   

In my current research, I use arts-based, auto-ethnographic methods to re-create and heal how I ‘see’ myself and my students, and to deconstruct how we are ‘seen’ by others. Arts-based methods align with an activist stance in that I view art-making as a political necessity and act of resistance. In the context of a neoliberal educational system that demands functionality and rejects students whose differences render them ‘dysfunctional’, I propose that not only does art-making enable the construction of an oppositional gaze (hooks, 1992) but it allows for pleasure as resistance and agency (Morgan, 2015) and an assertion of one’s bodily presence in a world (Raine, 2005); all of which also render the act of art-making a political-personal act of ‘self-care’ (Lorde, 1988).

My methods draw upon the work of artists, Ana Mendieta and Frida Kahlo, whose installations and paintings assert the presence of the female body in the environment and interrogate the violences inflicted upon it, and the theoretical framings of bell hooks’ oppositional gaze (1992), Audre Lorde’s theory of self-care (1988), and Joan Morgan’s black feminist theory of pleasure politics (2015). In the paper and presentation, I situate my methods in these theories and artworks, and describe my process as applied recently to the start of a project working with a young African-American woman diagnosed with a disability. My process included making drawings and digital video collages through which I questioned, deconstructed and re-created portraits of myself in relation to Frida Kahlo’s imagery and images of other disabled women of color. The drawings and collages were shared with my student to inspire our conversations about experiences as women of color with disabilities and also to spark her desire to use digital art tools to create her own images. The art-making and sharing of the art provided means to enact self-care and play with re-constructing our images which would not have been possible through discussion alone. To close, I will discuss the complications and implications of auto-ethnographic, arts-based methods for research and activism with the goal of seeing and bringing forth the voices, bodies and desires of those who do not have a place in our educational system.

Author

• Helen Kwah, Hunter College