Recently, Luvell Anderson and I agreed that sometime in the near future we would attempt to coauthor an article on disability and humour. While disability is my jam, Luvell is an expert on aesthetics and in particular philosophical approaches to humour. Humour (unlike the apparatus of disability) has long been regarded as an important topic for philosophical investigation. In his contribution to The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, for example, the prominent American philosopher of art Noёl Carroll wrote: “humour seems to be a nearly universal component of human societies. Thus, it should come as no surprise that it has been a perennial topic for philosophy — especially for philosophers ambitious enough to attempt to comment on every facet of human life. Plato believed that the laughter that attends humour is directed at vice, particularly at the vice of self-unawareness.” In short, philosophers of art and aesthetics have long regarded humour, though not (the apparatus of) disability, as philosophically interesting.

Indeed, if Luvell and I write our prospective article on disability and humour, its very existence will go some distance to correct a grave injustice in philosophy of art and aesthetics, as well as philosophy in general. For, unlike humour, both (the apparatus of) disability and philosophical study of it—namely, philosophy of disability—remain virtually excluded from the subfield of aesthetics/philosophy of art. A discourse on aesthetic injustice that is forthcoming in Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (hereafter JAAC) has brought this blight to the fore.

Unless you are a philosopher of art and aesthetics (or you follow the newsfeed at PhilPeople/PhilPapers), however, you may have missed the skirmish that has taken place in JAAC around claims made in Aesthetic Injustice, the most recent monograph by philosopher of art and aesthetics, Dominic Lopes. Unless you are a philosopher of disability, furthermore, you may have failed to recognize that the skirmish itself inadvertently expands the scope and depth of aesthetic injustice against disabled people that the subdiscipline of philosophy of art/aesthetics and the discipline and profession of philosophy persistently produce and that the parties involved in the skirmish–Lopes and his critics Anne Eaton, Sherri Irvin, Camilla Palazzolla, Gaia Penna, and Charlie Wiland–variously claim to contest.

While I have not read Lopes’s book, I did read the JAAC critical review article about it by Eaton and coauthors, Lopes’s JAAC response to the Eaton et als. article, and an earlier article by Lopes about art and blindness. Neither the Eaton et als. article, nor Lopes’s response to it (and thus nor likely his book) says anything about who is teaching aesthetics in philosophy departments and who is excluded (i.e., disabled people) from doing so. Yet this exclusion is a significant component of the aesthetic injustice that disabled people, especially disabled students and unemployed disabled philosophers (of art) confront. In short, who is teaching about disability and aesthetics, what are they teaching about it, and how are they teaching about it constitute questions that remain unrecognized and unaddressed by Lopes and his critics. Put directly, I have little confidence that any of these philosophers of aesthetics and art adequately addresses disability and aesthetics–let alone disability and aesthetic injustice–in their classrooms. While they overlook questions about epistemic and pedagogical authority with respect to disability and aesthetics, the resources that they use and materials that they cite on the topic are limited and outdated and the scope of their claims about disability and injustice are far too narrowly circumscribed.

In “Aesthetics and Philosophy of Disability,” her contribution to The Oxford Encyclopedia of Disability Studies, philosopher of disability Licia Carlson (whose considerable body of work on disability and aesthetics seems to be unfamiliar to Lopes and Eaton et als.) makes these remarks with respect to Aesthetic Injustice:

In his book Aesthetic Injustice, Dominic Lopes identifies two related forms of harm and injustice related to the arts and addresses them in the context of disability: “Weaponized aesthetics involves any expressive practices that are drawn from aesthetic culture and that stem from and compound social injustice. By contrast, aesthetic injustice involves harms to people in their aesthetic capacities that subvert certain justice- relevant interests. To show that aesthetic injustice stems from and compounds aesthetics that has been weaponized to target disabled people, the first step is to identify the harms to their aesthetic capacities.” (Lopes, 2024: 132-33) There are many examples of what Lopes calls “weaponized aesthetics” that affect our cultural conceptions of disability, including dominant beauty standards that inform aesthetic values and ableist norms that shape the many artistic practices and institutions I have discussed here. Moreover, there is no question that people with disabilities have suffered forms of aesthetic injustice, insofar as they have had their “aesthetic capacities” denied, distorted, and undermined. Yet even in Lopes’s account (in which he devotes a single chapter to disability called “Outlier Aesthetics”), there are elements of his characterization of disability worthy of critical scrutiny. For example, how does his focus on blindness and tactile drawing, specifically, reiterate certain assumptions about the nature of blindness and visual art that disability theorists like Kleege have challenged? Lopes does not engage with Kleege, but her book and the extensive writings of other disability scholars show a broad range of blind artists whose work challenge ableist assumptions about what kinds of art “the blind” are able to produce. Moreover, what might it mean, in discussions of art and justice, to move disabled artists and audiences from the margins (beyond simply being examples of “outliers”) to the center, as Kleege does in her work? (Kleege, 2018)

Disabled artists and disability arts movements are refashioning the very boundaries of what constitutes art. In her book Feminist Blues Legacies, philosopher Angela Davis examines the ways that women blues artists in the first half of the twentieth century engaged in “protest art” through the lyrics and performances of their songs. Through her nuanced, critical analysis, she challenges the dominant interpretations that denied the agency of these women artists and refused to recognize the political content of their songs. Davis also shows how racist and sexist tropes and structural inequalities undermined a fuller appreciation of their art, and reveals the many forms of subversion and resistance that they engaged in through their live performances. In a similar vein, there is a rich tradition and growing body of work by disabled artists that, when examined carefully, can simultaneously expose forms of ableism, and affirm new, creative forms of political change and resistance. 

One example of this can be found in the context of intellectual disability. For some people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, their only exposure to art is through forms of art or music therapy. (Carlson, 2022) While these methods can be helpful and impactful in some cases, there are other forms of artistic expression that can be cultivated beyond the limits of rehabilitative and therapeutic practices which often rely upon a medical model of disability. Moving artistic encounters beyond the clinical and into inclusive social, cultural spaces can create new friendships and connections, enable forms of artistic expression, and foster communities in new ways. In many cases, these art initiatives combine disabled and non-disabled participants, thereby subverting traditional roles (e.g. passive recipient of care and non-disabled caregiver/clinician/expert) and creating new modes of artistic collaboration.

For example, Anna Hickey-Moody discusses the Restless Dance Theatre, a dance company in Australia that works with both intellectually disabled and non-disabled participants.  Hickey-Moody highlights “some of the methods through which ideas of ‘cultures of intellectual disability’ and ‘reverse integration’ are worked with on a range of different levels throughout the process of devising and performing dance theatre. Reappropriating cultural and physical places or increasing the number of spaces inhabited by people with intellectual disability is a key aspect of Disability Arts.” (Hickey-Moody, this volume). In The Capacity Contract, Stacy Clifford Simplican addresses the intersection of political philosophy, dance, and disability in the context of self-advocacy movements. She writes, “Dance accomplishes important tasks for disability rights activists: it reveals the contractual model of personhood and freedom as incomplete, it models alternative modes of connection between persons detached from cognitive competence, and it expresses an enjoyment of life often assumed impossible for people with disabilities.” (Simplican, 2015: 130-1) There are many more examples of these kinds of arts programs, all of which point to the important ways that supporting the artistic, aesthetic lives of people with disabilities is not only a form of disability justice, but a way of enabling forms of flourishing, collaboration, and participation in community.

Although, Carlson notwithstanding, the aforementioned philosophers of art and aesthetics seem to disregard cutting-edge (and recent) work in philosophy and theory of disability and how it should condition their own work on disability and aesthetics, we can demand that they do better, that is, we must demand that they be accountable for the work on disability that they don’t produce, for the work on disability that they do produce, and for the extent to which this work is edifying and transformative, that is, benefits disabled people. Ideally, these latter philosophers of art and aesthetics would engage in self-reflection about the roles that they themselves play in the philosophical, pedagogical, and institutional reproduction of ableist aesthetic injustice in philosophy and academia more broadly and in the political, social, economic, and infrastructural persistence of ableist injustice of society more broadly.