#NoBodyIsDisposable: Visual politics and performance in collective activist movements

ABSTRACT

The #NoBodyIsDisposible hashtag has become a sign of coalitional politics built through fat and disability activism since 2019. #NoBodyIsDisposible and other hashtags have been used for both street-based and virtual activism to underline the ways in which multiple forms of oppression affect the everyday lives of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, Pacific Islander, and additional People of Color, immigrants, disabled, chronically ill, and neurodivergent people, and fat people in the United States. This article suggests that the visual and performance-based work of activists using the #NobodyIsDisposible hashtag makes inroads in challenging oppressive tendencies of dominant culture and emphasizes the significance of visual modes of coalitional political activism.

KEYWORDS:

• Fat activism
• disability justice
• coalitional politics
• visual art
• performance art

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. For the purposes of this article, the terms ally and accomplice will be used interchangeably. There are significant differences in the ways the terms are understood and used within many social justice movements, however. One of the best explanations I have encountered of these terms reads, “All accomplices are allies, but not all allies are accomplices. While an ally is willing to stand in support of a marginalized voice, risk is rarely involved. An accomplice uses the power and privilege they have to challenge the status quo, often risking their physical and social well being in the process” (University of Pittsburg Library 2021).

2. In describing how memes are created and how they pluralistically function online, digital media scholars Tim Highfield and Tama Leaver note, “When plausible (or aimed at an audience that is receptive to their apparent truth), these images can spread widely before any correction is made (and without the correction being spread in the same way – which of course is also apparent for text-based rumors and misinformation)” (Highfield and Leaver 2016, 52–53).

3. Superfat is a term coined at the 2008 NOLOSE conference (www.nolose.org) by fat activists who found that higher status was given to those fat people, even at a fat-positive event/ organization like NOLOSE, who were on the smaller side of the fat spectrum. Superfat was created as a way to capture “a superhero vibe” to uplift the fattest people at the event and the term has stuck and spread well beyond the NOLOSE conference and culture. As Cherry Midnight and Max Airborne, both longtime fat activists describe, “Superfat was intentionally created and chosen, after extensive discussion, as a means of visibility, self-love, and empowerment; a way of naming ourselves and making our experience visible.” Superfat embodies the “Nothing about us without us” philosophy described above for the fattest of fat community members (Midnight and Airborne 2020).

4. Disabled activists and writers Alice Wong, Jillian Weise, and Ashley Shew broadly describe all disabled people as cyborgs, regardless on their reliance on specific hardware for survival. Weise notes that she is “open to anyone disabled claiming the term,” with Shew confirming that she has a “pretty broad definition of cyborg,” and Wong noting, “some of the ways I think about cyborg bodies is our attachment, our reliance on things outside of our organic meat sac that we’re born with.” Considering the ableist leanings of “cure culture” that Wong, Weise, and Shew discuss in the podcast, to embrace disabled people as cyborgs is to value their presence with and through technology rather than attempting to “advance” technology to the point that all disabilities – and thus all disabled people – are eliminated from the world. As Wong argues, “it’s not just chilling, but it’s also fixing, is this idea that somehow, by using this device or this augmentation, that somehow that makes you whole. You know, that somehow, that disabled person is still, will be transformed. And I think that’s another huge misconception […] that can use these things to improve our lives. But it does not change, inherently, our disabled experience in society. And that’s, you know, so much of it is about the way we’re seen and the way our society is still very much ableist” (Wong, Weise, and Shew 2019).

5. While US Immigration policy had not substantially changed under Donald Trump’s administration, the approaches to implementing the policies in place became more widespread and brutal beginning in 2017 via the Trump administration. According to Human Rights Watch (2020), since 2017 “the detention machine has exploded,” and ACLU attorneys note that even before COVID-19 affected people in North America, “detained people were unable to get basic care, they were held in a culture of fear, without any clear way to get out of detention. In a global pandemic, these conditions – overcrowding, lack of access to medical care, staff who don’t speak Spanish, etc. – become even more deadly.”

6. I’m aware of the contestation of the use of the term “concentration camps” to describe the US/ Mexico Border immigrant camps that have burgeoned since 2017, but choose to use the term in accordance with the definition that “Concentration camps in general have always been designed – at the most basic level – to separate one group of people from another group. Usually, because the majority group, or the creators of the camp, deem the people they’re putting in it to be dangerous or undesirable in some way” (Waitman Wade Beorn quoted in Holmes 2019).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stefanie Snider

Stefanie Snider, Ph.D., is an art historian. Her research focuses on contemporary visual representations by, for, and about marginalized communities, including LGBTQ+ people, fat people, disabled people, and people of color. Snider is dedicated to showcasing makers and subjects who have historically been left out of conventional art spaces and art history discourses as part of a larger view toward representing Art History as a project dedicated at least in part to social justice and the politics of visibility.