Guest Editors’ Introduction: Coming to Pride - Joining “The Unruly Salon”

The acronym for the Unruly Salon, “US” refers to Charleton’s idea that all too often people with disabilities are the subjects of a gaze, which medicalizes, criminalizes or produces objectifying pity. A host of circulating images, signs, and discourses contribute to the sometimes overwhelming sense that people with disabilities do not represent themselves as the active agents of their own self-authorized narratives. The agency of people with disabilities to create culture that defies such understandings is unruly. This mind-body politic is the lifeforce of the global disability arts and culture movement..