What’s in a name? The politics of labeling in disability performance

In the past three decades disabled scholars, artists, and their allies have highlighted the politics of representing the disabled body in theater, film, literature, museums, and the media. They have begun to address a problematic legacy of visibility-without-agency by advocating for positive self-representations of disabled people across a range of arts practices. Terms like disabled, handicapped, and crippled have been critiqued and in some cases reclaimed to articulate the distinctiveness of crip culture and performance. Terms like disability arts, arts and disability, artists with disability, and disability-led arts practice have been applied to politicized performance by disabled artists. This chapter argues that such terms have in effect become politicized performative gestures in their own right, which enact and guide the enactment of a disability rights agenda. It examines how artists’, archivists’, and historians’ efforts to relabel past work—to redact offensive labeling of disabled people as other from the historical record—is impacting our understanding of the evolution of this field of politicized practice. It also examines the impact changing ways of labeling art about, with, and by disabled people today is having. Labels certainly can be critical political gestures, designed to achieve critical maneuvers at critical moments in time, along the trajectory toward rights for disabled people. However, the idea that labels will serve in perpetuity, both in prospect and in retrospect, in wholly unproblematic ways, is less certain. In this sense, labels designed to support specific political shifts may always be “right for now” rather than “right forever.