“My Leg is a Giant Stiletto Heel”: Fashioning the prosthetised body

Abstract

Previously one of the most marginalized physiques, the disabled body has been gaining unprecedented visibility in popular culture in the twenty-first century. This phenomenon has risen from a range of circumstances. Influential among them are the grim political realities of war, resulting in mass injuries in the Middle East; the rise of the figure of the disabled athlete due to the increased popularity of the Paralympic games; improved awareness and implementation of policies ensuring equality and fairness; and the increased media presence of inspirational figures in art and fashion, music, and science. Visibility for non-normative bodies is usually made possible by the various strategies of “mainstreaming” (Garland-Thomson 1996), making such bodies more palatable and incorporating them into dominant discourses. In this article, we unpack such strategies with relation to representations of disabled bodies in fashion and art, and their correlative, popular culture.