The performative body of disabled women: Toward the politics of visibility in China

Abstract

Disabled people are largely invisible in China, and disabled women are even more so. Therefore, it is crucial for disabled Chinese women to mobilize their performative bodies to gain visibility in public and resist marginalized and stigmatized identities. This article focuses on ‘Disabled Sisters Best’, an activist group for disabled women in China, as a case to explain how the disabled performative body can provide a site of visualization of disabled Chinese women, why this is feasible and the implications. In particular, this article takes the body as a point of departure to examine disabled women’s bodily experience, body images and social media usage, and explain how their practices of mediatizing the performative body indicate a sort of politics of visibility that may possibly alter how we see disability, sexuality and identity, in addition to altering how they are practiced and what they can be.

Keywords

Body disability identity performative body visibility WeChat women

Introduction

According to the China Disabled Persons’ Federation (CDPF, 2012), approximately 85 million people in China are estimated to have disabilities. With such a vast population of disabled people, guaranteeing the visibility of disabled people in the Chinese media landscape and the wider Chinese society is of vital importance. However, disabled people have long been overlooked, or at least marginalized, in public spaces in China; that is, the invisibility of disability, or disabled people as ‘the invisibles’, is obvious in China because of the impact of traditional beliefs, Confucian ideology, and government policy (Campbell and Uren, 2011: 12). More importantly, disabled women are more deeply in the shadows, because women have been less represented than men in Chinese society throughout history (Lin and Yang, 2019). A local Chinese survey also shows that disabled women face much severer issues and are more disadvantaged in almost every field of survival and development in China; in particular, there are still large gaps between disabled women and able-bodied women and between disabled women and disabled men in China (Liu et al., 2013).

The visibility of disability is also an increasingly important research topic in academia (Davis and Smith, 2006). For example, the Journal of Visual Culture (2006) launched a special issue titled ‘Disability-Visuality’ to propose a conversation between disability studies and visual culture studies. Few studies, however, focus on the specific questions of disabled and gendered identities. This article, therefore, aims to follow this research strand to illustrate how disabled women strategically mobilize their performative bodies to struggle to gain visibility in public on the one hand and to resist marginalized and stigmatized identities on the other hand. To achieve this research goal, this article accordingly used ‘Disabled Sisters BEST’ (hereafter, ‘BEST’, as the interviewees preferred) as a particular case to explain how the disabled performative body can provide a site of visualization of disabled Chinese women, why this is reasonable and possible and the implications of this.

Literature review

Critical disability studies

Originated in the 1970s, when disabled activists and advocates campaigned for rights and justice, disability studies had emerged as a new research field that primarily focused on achieving political inclusion for disabled people, with discourses on civil rights, liberal justice and minority politics (Barnes and Mercer, 2003; Davis, 1995). Scholars from this strand had developed a social model that regards disability as a socio-political endeavor against social barriers in a disabling society (Goggin and Newell, 2000; Oliver, 2013). That said, an impairment does not necessarily result in disability; rather, disability is a result of socially constructed policies, attitudes, ideas and practices.

However, traditional disability studies and the social model of disability had received critiques, especially for focusing on the global North (Meekosha and Shuttleworth, 2009), neglecting the political origins of disablement (Tremain, 2017) and over-relying on materialist analysis and the disability/impairment binary (Eilers, 2020). Accordingly, some scholars began to rethink the conventions, assumptions and aspirations of disability studies beyond the social model with a more nuanced focus on culture, language and discourse (Oliver and Barnes, 2012). Therefore, there had been a growing use of the term ‘Critical Disability Studies’ (CDS) by scholars such as Fiona Kumari Campbell (2008, 2009), Dan Goodley, (2011, 2013), Helen Meekosha (Meekosha and Dowse, 2007; Meekosha and Shuttleworth, 2009), Margrit Shildrick (2004, 2009) and Shelley Tremain (2001, 2017).

Building upon the social model of disability, CDS continues the struggle for social justice and diversity but on another plane of development which is ‘not simply social, economic and political, but also psychological, cultural, discursive and carnal’ (Meekosha and Shuttleworth, 2009: 50). CDS dedicates to unpacking and illuminating ‘the complex nature of disability’ (Goodley, 2013: 641), with ‘a more complex conceptual understanding of disability oppression’ (Meekosha and Shuttleworth, 2009: 50). Accordingly, it aims to reinterpret the conventional notions and meanings of disability by highlighting disabled people’s experiences and placing them within wider societal power relations, because from the CDS perspective, disability has become ‘a question of politics and power(lessness), power over, and power to’ (Devlin and Pothier, 2006: 2). This question of politics, or ‘the politics of disability’, as the unique criticality of CDS, reveals ‘the very conditions of inequity that blight the human condition’ (Goodley et al., 2019: 973). That calls for an in-depth analysis of structural underpinnings of normativity, hierarchy and inequity; more specifically, intersectional barriers of disability, among which invisibility is one of the most fundamental problems.

Disability and visibility

Despite decades of disability advocacy and activism since the 1970s, disabled people are still among the most marginalized and invisible in the world. Until recently, disabled people have typically been invisible in mainstream development programs (Kett et al., 2009); accordingly, ‘disability remains largely invisible in official development statistics’ (Gartrell et al., 2016: 389). Especially, stereotypical media representations are argued to be fundamental to the social discrimination and exclusion against disabled people (Ellis and Goggin, 2015). This representational politics, as a set of spectacle, knowledge, beliefs and opinions given to disability, reveals very disempowering and stereotyping practices toward disabled people. It has often failed to define, reflect, represent and perpetuate disability accurately and objectively because it over-relies on stereotypical representations of disability that reproduce prejudices and dominant hegemonic narratives against disabled people (Devotta et al., 2013; Silva and Howe, 2012). Accordingly, a disabled person or body is represented as weak, pitiable, immobile, dependent and even dangerous, or, simultaneously, as superhuman, cyborg or supercrip (Pullen et al., 2019; Silva and Howe, 2012). Both portrayals fail to recognize the limiting social problems, cultural oppression and systematic changes that construct disabling conditions; rather, they contribute to the construction of a disabling society and even reinforce the entire hegemonic order against disability (Ellcessor and Kirkpatrick, 2017; Ellis and Goggin, 2015).

Therefore, some scholars have criticized the stereotyping representation of disability in the real world, the media and academia, and raised the critical question of the ‘invisibility of disability’ (Brueggemann et al., 2001: 369, emphasis in original). For example, Hirsch (1995: 27) argues that ‘few historians have included disability issues as an integral part of their thinking and writing’. Similarly, Davis (1995: 4) states that ‘there is a strange and really unaccountable silence when the issue of disability is raised (or, more to the point, never raised)’.

More recently, disability is finally ‘becoming visible’ (Brueggemann et al., 2001: 370), and has become ‘an increasingly acknowledged dimension of social difference’ (Gothard, 2011: 19). On the one hand, it has been gradually understood that the salience of disability representation may have a broader effect in various contexts (Lyons et al., 2018). On the other hand, there are more scholars studying disabled people’s struggles for visibility, thus making the invisible visible in academia (Kim and Sellmaier, 2020; Mantilla and Goggin, 2019).

Scholars from this strand appeal to break the silence and invisibility of disability, to give voice to the voiceless, and to allow people to say the unthinkable, thus ensuring the visibility and representation of disabled people in development interventions (Richards, 2008). Accordingly, they expect to address ‘the theoretical, statistical and programmatic invisibility of disability’ by providing ‘locally grounded knowledge collected by and for people with disabilities’ (Gartrell et al., 2016: 1389). Especially, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities provides an unprecedented recognition of the human rights of disabled people, which guarantees the global politicization and visibility of disability (Soldatic, 2013). To some extent, the visibility of disability has become a political issue addressing the need for disabled people to be ‘accepted as valued, significant and worthwhile members of society: people who have every right to belong’ (Gothard, 2011: 26).

In this sense, disability and visibility are intertwined with each other because disability is both determined by and determining our understanding of visibility; disability can bend our existing conceptions of visibility, thereby providing new ways of thinking about the problems of visibility (Davis and Smith, 2006). However, the interrelationship between disability and visibility does not necessarily lead to or guarantee the visibility of disability. Previous studies have efficiently explained why visibility is important for disability, but this still leaves much room for us to further explore the question of ‘how’: how can disabled people attain visibility? This study will propose a possible approach to the disabled performative body to answer this question.

Disabled performative body

Bodies that matter is a key theoretical inscription in CDS that deals with impairment and corporeality without medicalizing, essentializing, re-naturalizing and depoliticizing disability (Goodley, 2011, 2013; Shakespeare, 2014). The social model of disability is used to deny the body or consider the body in ambiguous and relational ways in different political and historical moments (Ghai, 2006; Goodley, 2011; Shakespeare, 2014). But CDS demands us to rethink the impaired body as a social body that resurfaces as a significant element of the disability experience (Goodley, 2013; Shildrick, 2009). This corporeality of disability challenges normative ideas of abled bodies, refutes corporeal standards and demands inclusive and reflective theorization of the body as a threshold, a field and a place where self and society interact (Goodley, 2011). That said, CDS creates non-hegemonic, open and generative knowledge of bodies to extend the idea of the fluid social body, recasting the disability as a complex site of social, cultural, economic, political and more importantly, corporeal production (Hickey-Moody, 2017; Shildrick, 2009). In this sense, CDS can be regarded as ‘a cultural studies of the body’ (Millett-Gallant, 2010: 6), because it shows how the disabled body may serve as a site, target and vehicle for ideology, subjectivity and identity performance of disabled people. It may also deconstruct dominant practices of categorizing, portraying and interpreting bodies to ‘overturn predominant stereotypes about bodies and norms for social acceptability’ (Millett-Gallant, 2010: 10). Therefore, the non-normative disabled bodies as performative entities have been argued to have great potential for disability studies, because it proposes an opportunity to rethink the identity, ethics, values and politics that congregate around such disabled performative bodies (Goodley, 2013; Shildrick, 2009).

Following this research strand, this study will focus on the performativity of the body to explore the performative nature of disability identity, especially the disabled and gendered identities of disabled women. Indeed, according to Butler (1990), gender is a socially constructed performance in which the individual agent acts. In this sense, sex does not necessarily cause or produce gender; rather, gender performativity suggests that gender is an expression or performance of sex (Butler, 1990). Specifically, Butler (1990) contends, ‘There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender . . . identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results’ (p.25).

Similarly, we may argue that the disability identity, especially the disabled and gendered identities of disabled women, is a performance or accumulation of performances. In this sense, disability is not a universal and unchangeable condition of who one is; rather, it is what a body does at particular times as a result of bodily performance. Because of this performativity, ‘agency is an inherent part of any body, be it a disabled human body, a body of water, a political party’ (Hickey-Moody and Crowley, 2010: 401). Therefore, many scholars explore the bodily capacity – the question of ‘What can a body do?’ and ‘Of what effects is a body capable?’ rather than ‘What is a body?’ – of disability (Hickey-Moody and Crowley, 2010: 401). This article, accordingly, will analyze the practices of the disabled performative body in the following sections.

Background and methods

This study used the research methods of online and offline ethnography and ethnographic interviews based mainly on the research design of a case study. We purposively selected the typical social organization BEST as a case in this study. Previous studies suggest that there are very few disability-related non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to provide social support to disabled people in China (Lin et al., 2018; Luo and Zhang, 2015; Zhang, 2017). Indeed, the two co-founders of BEST, Ms. Peng and Ms. Sun, founded this organization in late 2017 because they realized when they produced the documentary Jackdaw, which focused on stories of disabled Chinese women, that there had been no specific social organizations focused on disabled women in China.

Focused on the case of BEST and its members’ practices of mediatizing the performative body, we conducted fieldwork in Beijing (from 7 November 2017 to 3 December 2017), Wuhan (from 5 January 2017 to 28 January 2018) and Guangzhou (from 7 June 2019 to 3 July 2019), and completed 55 ethnographic interviews (based on purposive sampling and snowball sampling) with different members, participants, practitioners, volunteers and audiences in and related to BEST. All informants were kept anonymous and permitted us to use their data. In addition, we also conducted virtual ethnography online, which spanned from 2017 to 2020 and covered everything related to BEST and its members, including their social media platforms such as WeChat Public Accounts, Sina Microblogs and Douyin. We have secured permission to do this study via ethical approval from our workplace.

Bodily experience as a sphere of activity

BEST’s mission is

to serve disabled women in a way of life aesthetics, to meet the spiritual and cultural needs of disabled women, to improve the quality of life of disabled women and their families, and to protect the inherent life dignity of disabled women

Indeed, when Ms. Peng and Ms. Sun founded BEST, they realized the severe pressure from families and society, and the problems of social discrimination and inequality faced by disabled women in China. These structural problems suggest that disability should not be simply individualized, medicalized, psychologized or victimized, but be understood as a socio-political construction underpinned by stigmatized attributes, social norms and structural oppressions (Goodley, 2011, 2013; Meekosha and Dowse, 2007; Meekosha and Shuttleworth, 2009). Especially in China, where disabled people experience severe social exclusion (Lin et al., 2018), disabled people ‘are still largely invisible in public spaces’ (Campbell and Uren, 2011: 12). Ms. Peng and Ms. Sun’s final goals, therefore, were to effect substantive changes in these fields. However, they believed that the consciousness of these issues was much more important because it was the foundation of related changes. Therefore, they initiated, organized and participated in over 60 workshops, seminars, training sessions, meetings, documentary film screenings, mindfulness meditations and other offline activities over 2 years. Every activity involved approximately 15–30 disabled women; they aimed to influence their consciousness of disability one by one, group by group.

For example, on 23 March 2018, they organized a ‘performance experience workshop’ titled ‘Blossom’, with the theme of ‘characters bloom on the stage’. Their invitation letter posted on their public WeChat account encouraged disabled women to imagine how it felt to be in the spotlight in a wheelchair, on crutches, with a cane or with a hearing aid. According to their self-report, when the disabled women stood on the stage, ‘they slowly began to release their true selves with the most beautiful blossom; they and their bodies together, become part of the stage, and become the dazzling light’. As one of the participants stated, ‘I found that it can release my nature, so I decided to participate in more similar activities to become a braver self’. Another participant reported that ‘I had an unprecedented feeling, not only a deeper understanding of myself but also the blossom of myself’. Ms. Peng summarized that this sort of experience helped disabled women to rethink the meanings of disability, which paradoxically meant being both fragile and strong because their common vulnerability made them stronger. Therefore, they could transform the impossible into the possible and bring the world more possibilities. However, CDS reminds us not to romanticize such ‘true selves’ or ‘nature’; rather, it recognizes the ‘fragile and contingent nature of personhood’ (Beckett, 2006: 3), which accepts rather than denies our inherent vulnerability.

Other offline activities were similar. Disabled women came together, sat together, danced together, hugged together and shared together. Ms. Peng believed that this type of bodily experience was the most powerful and efficient way to arouse disabled women’s consciousness of disability. The arousing of the consciousness, in return, prepared for further direct actions against social stereotypes, stigma, discrimination, domestic violence, sexual abuse and gender inequality in China (Lin and Yang, 2019). This type of bodily experience with the potential for direct action was more obvious in other offline activities like field trips in spring and autumn, which made disability visible not only to disabled women themselves but also in public. Indeed, as disability scholar Garland-Thomson (2009: 194) argues, ‘To be recognized, one needs literally to be seen’. Therefore, disabled women need to be seen as equal citizens in the public sphere in a way that gradually produces a visual landscape in China.

For instance, on 12 March 2019, around International Women’s Day, BEST invited 12 disabled women and recruited several volunteers to visit Beijing Olympic Park together. In particular, BEST recruited four voluntary make-up artists for the disabled women on the site, and another three voluntary photographers to get headshots of the disabled women. This type of bodily experience, again, was effective for the arousing of consciousness of self in the disabled participants: ‘The weather is so damn good, and I am so damn beautiful!’; ‘I am such a sweet girl!’; ‘Blind girls love to be beautiful too!’; ‘Girls can be cool and handsome too because I am so handsome!’. From the CDS perspective, this kind of language – beautiful, sweet, cool and handsome – used to describe disability is important because it argues for a re-evaluation of the nature of disability as well as the existing power structures, discourse and culture in the current society (Eilers, 2020). It also calls for a recognition of the continuous and undefined becoming rather than being of bodies and the complex intersectional experiences and structures underpinning this process (Meekosha and Shuttleworth, 2009).

Such activities, as a type of bodily performance, also attracted many spectators, which fulfilled the objective of the founders to make disability visible in public. As Ms. Sun explained,

We know that it may be not as convenient as other common people for disabled women to go outside. But, for all this, we must come outside to let the public and the government see the social barriers. Only by seeing each other, can we understand each other, so that changes may happen.

To some extent, different from the traditional route of ‘from silence to visibility to consciousness’ in the West (Brueggemann et al., 2001: 372), BEST was practicing the possible route ‘from silence to self-consciousness, to visibility, and to public-consciousness’. In this sense, BEST and its founders recognized the power of the performative body; it not only aroused consciousness but also called for direct actions and changes. To use Rancière’s (2004: 40) concept, they understood how to transform the gendered and disabled body into a ‘sphere of activity’ in which disability was staged. That is, they employed their gendered and disabled bodies to create a space to perform concerted actions that allowed them to be seen by the public and the government. To some extent, as a site of visibility, the performative body established a realm in which disabled consciousness, actors and appeals can be seen with irreducible autonomy, reclaiming the rights of the disabled. In this way, the performative body demonstrated the bodily capacity of disabled women in China.

Body images with the power to see

This bodily capacity of disabled women was further demonstrated by another activity, Disabled Women’s Album, in December 2018. To commemorate the 10th anniversary of China’s signing of CRPD, BEST invited 10 disabled women from all over China to gather in Beijing and pursue their dreams of publishing an album. These disabled women, aged 24–34, came from different areas, industries and family backgrounds. However, they shared similar stories of confronting social barriers, taking on challenges and proving themselves with different achievements. As BEST stated,

Through their stories, we can see the growth of a generation of women, the arousing of disability awareness, and the awakening of women’s consciousness. Let us bear in mind the commitment of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and work together to promote the development of disability issues and make it bear fruit and fragrance all over China.

These 10 disabled women confidently displayed their disabled and gendered bodies with bright smiles (Figure 1). Everyone provided their own stories alongside their body images. They also created manifestos like ‘this is the best version of me!’; ‘Best sisters have power!’; and so on. Therefore, this album represented not only the landscape of the visible but also the realm of visibility, audibility and perception. In this sense, these body images had been essentially political, resonating with what Bottici (2014) argues, that ‘images seem to have become a crucial political weapon’ (p.120), because these body images aimed to reflect social inequality and serve as a form of resistance in contemporary China. In this sense, images ‘are no longer only the medium by which we communicate our political activities, but have also become an end in themselves: the very stuff that politics is made of’ (Bottici, 2014: 106).

Figure 1.

Several photos of the disabled women in the album (provided by BEST, reproduced with permission).

Besides the publishing of the album, BEST also organized an offline exhibition in Beijing on 2 December to attract more people’s attention to these body images. On 6 November, BEST announced this event with an appealing letter titled ‘Disabled Women’s Album: Meet your best self in their stories’. This letter was posted on its public WeChat account and stated,

For most disabled women, how could we look at our bodies? How could we face the staring from mainstream society? How to make the diverse souls from different disabled bodies to be seen? How could everyone see herself with special charms? In fact, her story, her soul, and you, will shine!

Go to her side, listen to her story, and share your voice.

What you see of her is what you see of yourself. Everyone is a mirror. We see ourselves in the lives of others. We hope you meet your best self in the stories and faces of these unique women.

This statement, utilizing the emancipatory discourse of CDS (Meekosha and Shuttleworth, 2009), resonated with two themes, namely, ‘bodies that matter’ and ‘self and Other’, which Dan Goodley (2013: 631) identified in CDS. It permitted a moment of disruption and a chance for us to ask, ‘in what ways do disabled bodies rearticulate what qualifies as a body that matters?’ (Goodley, 2013: 636). But it did not really challenge the corporeal standard of the ableist ideal and risked being ‘hit with the mirror of the abled self’ that ‘looks back at the disabled Other’ (Goodley, 2013: 640). This suggested that although such kinds of individual self-empowerment were affirmative, further critiques of the dominant order and the existing doxa about the nature of disability were still needed to challenge the hegemonic and oppressive socio-political construction of disability.

Nevertheless, this album and its exhibition can be interpreted as a sort of ‘visual activism’, which put disabled women in the public eye, saying ‘look at me’ instead of ‘don’t stare’ (Garland-Thomson, 2009: 193). In this sense, these body images demonstrated a sort of ‘the power to see’ (Haraway, 1988: 581), through which disabled women struggled to be seen by the public while the public was also invited to look at themselves as well as disabled women in new ways. The exhibition of these body images was successfully launched on 2 December 2018, and attracted hundreds of people to participate in the event and look at the photos. It was also a concrete way that the public was empowered to have the right to look at themselves, to recognize the diversity of Chinese society and to become aware of more possibilities in life. The body images also constituted an image event that attracted several local and online media outlets to cover this event, extending the body images to a wider public. This image event urged the public to question, rethink and disrupt the unique ‘identity category’ of disability in flux; ‘anyone can enter [it] at any time, and we will all join it if we live long enough’ (Garland-Thomson, 2002: 20).

Social media as a space of appearance

Besides the occasional image events, BEST also relied on different new media like Sina Microblog, WeChat and Douyin to reach a much wider public and, more importantly, maintain contact with this public. Indeed, during the process of the representation of disability, as well as the bodily performance of disabled people, the media plays an intriguing and crucial part, through which disability is recognized as a key element in the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in society (Ellcessor and Kirkpatrick, 2017; Ellis and Goggin, 2015; Ellis and Kent, 2011, 2016). Therefore, an increasing number of scholars consider disability representation in media, the construction of disability via media technologies, the role of media in forming cultural assumptions about disability and how disabled audiences respond to media artifacts (Ellcessor and Kirkpatrick, 2017; Goggin and Newell, 2003). However, many previous studies on disability and media focus on the early web, prior to the development of social media, especially social networking applications (Ellis and Kent, 2011, 2016). Among the diverse social media in China, WeChat was the most important social media platform and has become a new way of ‘being-in-the-world’ for most Chinese people (Sun, 2015: 5), especially for BEST. During our fieldwork, we collected 125 posts and articles on BEST’s public WeChat account; each posted article had views ranging from the dozens to about 1000 readings. All activities organized by BEST, including those activities mentioned above, had been posted on WeChat, with online comments from BEST’s audiences.

In this sense, the public WeChat account can be interpreted as a way of going public that can create what Hannah Arendt (1958) calls the space of appearance. For Arendt (1958), human beings need to share their inner world in public to create a ‘space of appearance’ where they can actualize their potential to be political beings. Social media can serve as this type of space of appearance, allowing disabled women as political beings to realize and actualize their potential in the public sphere, where their words and deeds can be memorialized via other people’s recordings. This is because all of those posted articles were created not only by BEST but also by volunteers and participants of the related activities. For example, one volunteer engaged in the spring travel stated, ‘Each disabled woman is like a jackdaw, gray as it is, but full of life and soul as it flaps its wings across the sky’. Another who served in the ‘performance experience workshop’ stated, ‘the smiles on the faces, the bright eyes, and the sense of independence, confidence, and pride that spread all over their bodies, accurately showed how disability and beauty can be rolled into one when they performed’.

For Arendt (1958), the space of appearance is closely related to political narrative, because political beings are potentially actors in the space of appearance shared by others, especially the stories that others tell of their actions.

BEST also took advantage of social media’s capacity for connectivity to reconfigure the relation between body and space, and the forms of presence and appearance. In particular, BEST invited different disabled women to share their body images through appeals on their public WeChat accounts on different special days. For example, on World Cerebral Palsy Day, BEST invited different disabled women with cerebral palsy to post photographs of themselves holding a paper sign that read ‘I am here, we are here’, appealing for support and commitment to the interests of disabled women. Similarly, on International Women’s Day, BEST invited disabled women to post images of themselves holding a sign that read ‘Disability, Sister, Bloom’ as a way ‘to break the stereotype of disabled sisters and to create a positive image of disabled sisters’. On Mother’s Day, BEST ‘invited mothers of different disabilities to post photos of themselves, claiming that they are PERFECT mothers’.

Through these methods, BEST ultimately created its own rhythms of time, appeal, visibility and appearance by reconfiguring the relationship between disabled women’s bodies and the social media space. The rhythmic rally of gendered body images with appeals on WeChat articulated the individual performative body through alliances on social media and transformed social media into a public sphere; they claimed and created this public sphere, rather waiting to be given it (Butler, 2011). This public sphere can be interpreted as a space of appearance for disabled women because it was where disabled bodies congregated and spoke; in Arendt’s (1958) term, it was a demand in its own right, a demand for presence in public. More importantly, it is the plurality of bodies or a collective body from which the force creating political space of appearance derives (Arendt, 1958). Butler (2011) also highlights the collective dimension of the performative body, especially the ‘between’ relation of bodies in alliance. In this case, as BEST stated, ‘I am here, we are here!’ This reflects what Arendt (1958: 197) claims, ‘I appear to others as others appear to me’.

Claiming disability, identity and diversity

The above issues of bodily experience, body images and social media all lead to the issues of the visibility and identity of disabled women in China. Previous studies suggest that disabled people have long been seen as defective, thus being socially marginalized, discriminated against and oppressed throughout history (Bulk et al., 2017; Daruwalla and Darcy, 2005); the disadvantage and stigmatized identity are still salient in China today (Lin and Yang, 2018). However, since the 1970s the global disability identity has been reinvented as a positive and thriving identity centered around human diversity, and inclined to restore pride and self-advocacy (Darling, 2013; Putnam, 2005). BEST, as a new type of disabled people’s self-help organization (DPO) emerging in China, especially in its struggles for visibility in the new era of social media, represented a possibility of resistance against such stigmatized identity in China. Indeed, CDS is also moving toward ‘resistance theories of disability’ targeted at the complex divergent ideas, social–political systems, power relations and cultural contexts of disability (Meekosha and Shuttleworth, 2009: 58). BEST regarded this resistance as a sort of ‘war’. As stated in the provocative words posted on the public WeChat account under the title ‘Shudder in the War without Smoke: Afraid but Determined’:

We fight so hard and desperately. We want to take back our voice, our bodies, our dignity, and our souls. Even though they were always there, we still have a sense of alienation and deprivation. We will fight on the earth, under the sun, feeling the scarlet blood and pride.

Therefore, besides the activities above, they organized and participated in dozens of offline and online activities, arousing the consciousness of the positive identity of disabled women in China. Examples of these include the activity of ‘shopping and shooting with me’ that helped ‘emancipate the shackles of the heart and break the barriers of the self, to see oneself, know oneself, and accept oneself’; the activity to ‘break the cocoon into a butterfly’ that taught disabled women to make themselves up to ‘let each sister find their own beauty and let beauty bloom’; and seminars and workshops that taught disabled women to fight against domestic violence and sexual abuse to ‘let everyone know that disability is not terrible, and each of us should speak out boldly to say “NO” to fate, to bravely pursue our own happiness’. Further activities were to ‘encourage disabled women to accept their bodies’, ‘accept and love your body and beauty, which may be not perfect but better than perfect’, ‘recognize that you are sexy and enjoy it’, ‘use the power of image to highlight the beauty of disability’ and, more importantly, ‘fight against discrimination due to the dual identities of “disability” and “women”’.

Therefore, as a new DPO, BEST was similar to its Western counterparts in that it was also dedicated to reinventing the disability identity, specifically a positive and gendered identity of disabled women in China. In particular, they employed the strategy of framing disability while ‘deliberately accentuating positive aspects of the disability and reframing negative stereotypes associated with the disability’ (Lyons et al., 2018: 1983), indicating a shift from disability to ability or varying abilities (Kim and Sellmaier, 2020: 496). However, this strategy was not just about claiming the positive aspects of disability, rather, it was also claiming a plurality of identities – or in Ellis’ (2008) terms, ‘disabling diversity’ – in the Chinese context. As we can see in the case, BEST claimed identities from diverse perspectives that disabled women were girls and women; daughters, wives and mothers; sexual objects and sexual subjects; teachers, businesswomen, activists and so on. That calls us to examine how disability intersects with other identities like gender, class, race, age and sexuality in ways that influence wider power relations, through which we can rethink a host of political, theoretical and practical issues that are relevant to all (Goodley, 2011).

More importantly, as discussed above, BEST also demonstrated both the right to be seen and the right to look. It invited different volunteers and audiences to participate in their activities, which also exerted a subtle influence on the public on their perception of disability identity and diversity. One volunteer, Ms. Li, posted on BEST’s public WeChat account:

It is a kind of power that is being transmitted, and a space full of unknown imagination, which enables me to view the disabled community in a more open and diversified way: that the number of disabled people is so staggering; that disabled people have such a variety of career choices; that disabled people can move very quickly; that disabled people’s life is so colorful; that disabled people are such a dynamic and vibrant community.

In this sense, BEST’s claims of disability identity and diversity, from the CDS perspective, allowed us to regard disability as inherently unstable and fluid categories, thus substantially creating new possibilities for changes to the originally stigmatized identity. These claims were continuing investments in the performative body of presentation and representation for the liberated subject of disability identity. In an era of the proliferation of difference, these claims contributed to not only the positive and diversified identities of disabled women in China but also a new society of disabling diversity as a whole. However, we should not romanticize such politics of visibility or merely visualize and celebrate diversity since the push for diversity ‘often does not lead to structural change’ (Mantilla and Goggin, 2019: 3), and may just lead to the so-called ‘inclusionism’ (Mitchell and Snyder, 2014). Rather, we needed new ways to create environments where disabled people can be successful in ways that they define themselves.

Concluding remarks

Following the research strand of CDS that is counter-hegemonic to dominant understandings of disability within ‘a radical agenda to restructure cultural meanings, social processes, and a carnally relevant politics’ (Meekosha and Shuttleworth, 2009: 56), this article understands disability as a social dynamic of power in relations to bodily difference. Specifically, it takes the body as a point of departure to explain how disabled women in China have used the bodily experience as a sphere of activity to show the bodily capacity of what a disabled body can do; how their body images guaranteed their right to be seen and the public’s right to look; how the rhythmic rally of their gendered bodies in alliance on WeChat transformed social media into a space of appearance; and how they claimed disabling diversity in the era of the exposure of difference to open up new possibilities of positive and diversified disability identities. Thus, this article demonstrated how disabled Chinese women strategically mobilized their performative bodies to struggle for visibility in public as a way of resisting marginalized and stigmatized identities. They gave us a chance to rethink, relate and resist the nature of disability against hybridized forms of inequality, discrimination and oppression (Goodley, 2013). Potentially, they may alter how we see disability, sexuality and identity in addition to altering what they are, what they practice and what they can be.

From the CDS perspective, therefore, disability demonstrates the potential to challenge, disrupt and destabilize the normativity of culture, society and politics. In this sense, disabled women’s practices of the performative body implied a highlighting of dynamic power, a recognition of differences and, most importantly, a struggle for visibility, which has become not only a political route but also an end in itself. That is, it indicated a sort of ‘politics of visibility’, a process of making visible a political category such as gender, race and disability that is and has been historically marginalized or invisible to the public, media, policy, law and so on (Banet-Weiser, 2015: 55). The politics of disability visibility have also been leveraged as a response, or even supply, to the social demand for the greater representation of disabled people due to the disability advocacy since the 1970s (Mantilla and Goggin, 2019).

However, we should not overromanticize and celebrate the politics of visibility in relation to disability. It is still very difficult to see how the problem of the invisibility of disability might be resolved in terms of practice, policy or politics; it is even harder to see how the approach it advocates can reform, promote or improve the injustices, inequalities and oppression experienced by disabled people around the world and specifically in China. Sometimes, paradoxically, it may even lead to related issues of stereotyping, othering, discrimination and stigmatization, and constitute further barriers that amplify disabled people’s isolation in society (Lyons et al., 2018; Mills, 2017; Saal et al., 2014). Especially in the current social context of China, the politics of invisibility related to disability implies a hegemonic power relationship that may cause disabled women in China to experience double oppression of visibility and invisibility due to overt and covert social stereotypes, stigma and discrimination (Lin and Yang, 2019). In this sense, such politics of visibility in China is just emerging rather than fading, and it is still a scarcity rather than a surplus; we start with it but never end with it. Therefore, let us end this article with BEST’s song:

The world is better with us

Hey! Girl! Don’t hide at home

Take the street and breathe in the fresh air

Even if the strange look is erratic

Ride the wheelchair with the wind, and move confidently

Hey! Girl! Don’t doubt yourself

Brush your eyeshadows, and put on your favorite new clothes

No fear of age, even if you can’t see clearly

I am full of vitality, and beautiful as well

The sunshine outside the window is just good, liberating the birds in your heart

We come together and show our true selves

The sunshine outside the window is just good, liberating the birds in your heart

We embrace each other together and make the world a little bit better

Hey! Girl! Sign ‘No’ (say ‘no’)

Don’t be defined, and don’t just be a birth tool

Listen to my orders, my mind, and body,

Don’t lose yourself even if you become a mother

Hey! Girl! Come and dance together

Even if you don’t coordinate well

It is okay to learn slowly

Hold your own rhythm and enjoy yourself

The sunshine outside the window is just good, liberating the birds in your heart

We come together and show our true selves

The sunshine outside the window is just good, liberating the birds in your heart

We embrace each other together and make the world a little bit better

We declare: what you see is just the beginning

Footnotes

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by the National Social Science Fund of China (No. 19CXW037).

ORCID iD

Liu Yang

Biographical Notes

Zhongxuan Lin (PhD) is a Professor at the School of Journalism and Communication, Jinan University, Guangzhou, China. His research interests include disability studies, cultural studies and communication studies. His work has appeared in Disability & Society; Asian Journal of Women’s Studies; Media International Australia; Chinese Journal of Communication; International Journal of Communication; Media, Culture & Society; International Journal of Cultural Studies; Information, Communication & Society; New Media & Society and among others.

Liu Yang (PhD) is an Associate Professor at the School of Communication and Design, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China. Her research interests include disability studies, feminist studies and political studies. She has published articles in Information, Communication & Society; New Media & Society, Disability & Society; International Communication Gazette; Visual Communication and so on.

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