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

Abstract

Fashion and prosthetics may appear at first glance to be unlikely bedfellows. Yet a tiny number of pioneering fashion scholars have begun to extend the concept of adornment beyond recognized forms of dress and examine items that were hitherto perceived as belonging to the medical domain. This article embraces a similar outlook and expands upon the currently available research. It considers how the amputee body is incorporated into the visual mainstream through the use of new generation “fashionable” prostheses, and how—and if—such prostheses can help to disrupt dominant discourses of normalcy. To do this, we study visual representations of three amputee artists and public figures: British performer Viktoria Modesta; American athlete, model, and speaker Aimee Mullins; and Japanese artist Mari Katayama. We argue that the use of aesthetic prostheses de-medicalizes disabled bodies and instead constructs them as consumer bodies, granting them what disability scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson calls “the freedom to be appropriated by consumer culture” and “integrating a previously excluded group into the dominant order”. We then turn to the few images of disability that subvert such order, by engaging with prostheses creatively or by rejecting them altogether and celebrating unadorned stumps.

Keywords:

• fashion
• disability
• prosthetics
• amputees
• non-normative bodies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

Notes

1 Prototype can be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jA8inmHhx8c (Accessed 30 May 2018)

2 The YouTube film has reached nearly 25 million views. It can be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjNVFZNwtYs (Accessed 30 May 2018)

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Laini Burton

Laini Burton is senior lecturer at the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, Australia where she is convenor of higher degree research programs, supervises doctoral candidates and teaches. Laini’s research centers on body politics, bio-art and design, fashion theory, performance, and body/spatial relations. She has presented her research in the USA, the UK, Russia, across Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and in China. Laini has acted as an independent and external assessor for government arts funding programs and various Australian universities. [email protected]

Jana Melkumova-Reynolds

Jana Melkumova-Reynolds is an associate lecturer at Chelsea College of Arts and London College of Fashion and an ESRC-funded doctoral candidate in the Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries at King’s College London. Her research focuses on the body, habitus, aesthetics, and affect in fashion and on the work of fashion intermediaries. She was a co-convenor of Fashion//Intersections: Bodies, Cultures, Spaces conference at London College of Fashion and is a member of Fashion Research Network’s steering group. [email protected]