Disability Arts and Culture: Methods and Approaches

By Petra Kuppers

This collection offers insight into different study approaches to disability art and culture practices, and asks: what does it mean to approach disability-focused cultural production and consumption as generative sites of meaning-making? International scholars and practitioners use ethnographic and participatory action research approaches; textual and discourse analysis; as well as other methods to discover how disability figures into our contemporary world(s).
 
Chapters within the collection explore, amongst other topics, deaf theatre productions, representations of disability on-screen, community engagement projects and disabled bodies in dance. Disability Arts and Culture provides a comprehensive overview and a range of case studies benefitting both the practitioner and scholar.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: May 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781789380019

Book preview

First published in the UK in 2019 by

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First published in the USA in 2019 by

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Cover image: Nobuhiro and Juri in the Thikwa plus Junkan Project Japan Premiere, Art Theater dB Kobe, Photo: Toshie Kusamoto.

A small person with glasses and grey-black hair in a purple shirt navigates their wheelchair carefully around another person lying prone on a stage. Light reflects off a black wheelchair wheel cantered into the space. An audience looks on.

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Contents

Introduction

Petra Kuppers

Texts and Complexities

Chapter 1: Pain proxies, migraine and invisible disability in Renée French’s H Day

Susan Honeyman

Chapter 2: At the intersection of Deaf and Asian American performativity in Los Angeles: Deaf West Theatre’s and East West Players’ adaptations of Pippin

Stephanie Lim

Chapter 3: The blind gaze: Visual impairment and haptic filmmaking in João Júlio Antunes’ O jogo/The Game (2010)

Eduardo Ledesma

Chapter 4: What are you looking at?: Staring down notions of the disabled body in dance

Meghan Durham-Wall

Discourse Analysis: Cultures and Difference

Chapter 5: Troubling images? The re-presentation of disabled womanhood: Britain’s Missing Top Model

Alison Wilde

Chapter 6: Representations of disability in Turkish television health shows: Neo-liberal articulations of family, religion and the medical approach

Dikmen Bezmez and Ergin Bulut

Chapter 7: The portrayal of people with disabilities in Moroccan proverbs and jokes

Gulnara Z. Karimova, Daniel A. Sauers and Firdaousse Dakka

People’s Voices: Qualitative Methods

Chapter 8: From awww to awe factor: UK audience meaning-making of the 2012 Paralympics as mediated spectacle

Caroline E. M. Hodges, Richard Scullion and Daniel Jackson

Chapter 9: Disability in television crime drama: Transgression and access

Katie Ellis

Chapter 10: ‘It’s really scared of disability’: Disabled comedians’ perspectives of the British television comedy industry

Sharon Lockyer

Ethnographic Approaches: Project Reports

Chapter 11: Re-voicing: Community choir participation as a medium for identity formation amongst people with learning disabilities

Nedim Hassan

Chapter 12: Dancing as a wolf: Art-based understanding of autistic spectrum condition

Kevin Burrows

Chapter 13: Disabling ability in dance: Intercultural dramaturgies of the Thikwa plus Junkan Project

Nanako Nakajima

Chapter 14: Swimming with the Salamander: A community eco-performance project

Petra Kuppers

Notes on Contributors

Introduction

Petra Kuppers

Welcome to this collection of essays on contemporary disability arts and culture. The material collected here showcases a rich range of different methods for garnering insights into connections between disability and contemporary culture. The essays’ authors have moved far away from understanding disability as a tragedy or a deficit. Instead, they embrace a perspective on disability as a mode of living that is or is not supported in a particular cultural arrangement, with culturally specific effects on the personal and the social level. Disability emerges not only as ‘a whole way of life’ and as ‘ordinary’, grounded in lived reality (to cite two meanings of Raymond Williams’s foundational keyword on ‘culture’, 1983). Disability also becomes a complex cultural concept that allows researchers to reflect on intercultural nets, on sustainability and community, on rupture and difference. In this way of understanding disability, it is part of a journey of embodiment and enmindment (a term that captures the process-based character of culturally shaped cognitive and mental life). Researchers can investigate both how popular cultural practices shape these ways of being and how in turn disabled culture activists perform, play with or subvert wider culture(s).

In these essays, disabled people are culture makers and artists, and they have agency in the ways in which they engage wider cultural narratives. This assertion links disability cultural studies to insights from other liberatory cultural studies, for example Jane Radway’s feminist work on investigating women’s agency in popular pleasures and the consumption of patriarchal narratives in pulp romance (1984), or Frantz Fanon’s investigations of black phenomenology, life under colonial racism (1991).

In this collection, disabled people are initiators, collaborators, sometimes clients and participants, but always in active roles that demand ethical engagement with what it means to be disabled, precarious, vulnerable or dismissible in a particular society. How to navigate relative power, how to address medical narratives, how to consume and produce material while living under pressures of gazes, stereotypes and old stories: these are the questions that underpin the material here. In order to find answers, the contributors use textual analysis; discourse analysis; qualitative methods including interviews, ethnographies and arts-based approaches. These overlapping and intertwining methods provide the organizing framework of this collection, and the subheading under which all contributions are arrayed, even while many essays engage more than one of these methods.

This collection emerged from five years’ worth of Intellect’s publishing archives, and a good trawl of the publishing company’s journal back issues. When invited to edit a collection out of this material, the wealth of material I found was astonishing and an excellent testimony to the vibrancy of contemporary disability arts and culture research. I particularly gravitated towards approaches emerging from ethnomethodology and participatory action research methods, i.e., methods that ensure reflections on power relations and goal setting in research. I did not include contributions focused primarily on historical research methods, as these tend to be well represented in the field generally, in many different national contexts.

Another inclusion criteria was international scope. In a rich, but demarcated pool of options, I focused on a balanced perspective between material generated from the United Kingdom and the United States, historical birth places for highly influential disability culture research production where disability studies have become a relatively mainstream academic endeavour, and other nations and regions with their own historically grounded approaches.

Different national disability studies, and disability arts and culture research, have different origin narratives, connections to activism and embedments in social and humanities approaches. In order to honour these diversities, I chose not to create a citational and definitional framing in this introduction. Rather than track particular developments and language uses, I point to the citational webs the individual authors provide, for their perspectives on important genealogies for their particular projects, grounded in different disciplines and national frameworks. I invite readers of this collection to compare different contributions’ citational webs.

By pointing to this kind of anti-hegemonic decision-making, I also invite future researchers to think through their own politics of citation, to not rest too easily in any one particular lineage for their work, and to stay curious about a particular term’s origins. In this relatively young discipline pool, it is possible to be strategic in one’s choices, and to shape origin stories that reflect the world we want to live in: one that aggregates its narratives from multiple perspectives and experiences.

In order to illustrate the opportunities inherent in thinking creatively about methods of gaining and aggregating knowledge, this introduction offers a case study to open up questions. I look at a cultural form that spans popular culture and experimental art: puppets and puppet making. Three different examples, from popular culture to art experimentation, highlight different avenues of knowledge production.

Methods of knowledge creation: Puppet shows

The first case study focuses on cultural production methods. In 2016, Sesame Street, the long-running children’s TV series based in the United States and syndicated world-wide, started a research project on autism representation. This resulted in the first introduction of a new puppet in a decade. The show welcomed Julia, an autistic muppet, an adorable little girl with yellow skin and orange hair whose behaviour follows non-normative scripts. Sesame Street’s development team actually named ‘people with autism’ as their advisors, and listed ASAN, an autistic self-advocacy network as part of their advisor organization (they also list Autism Speaks, a charity often identified as a hate-group by autistics). Lived experience with autism, usually as a family member, characterizes many of the executives involved with the project, but they also named specific autistic adults, for instance Julia Bascom, who is executive director of the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network. Bascom and others involved ‘wanted to focus on making sure that Julia had as much agency as possible’, and they sought to counter common portrayals of autistic children: ‘we didn’t want to show her as an educational object or an object of pity or a burden on the people around her’ (all according to Marissa Martinelli’s [2017] interview with Julia Bascom).

Julia Bascom gives specific examples about how the Julia character pushes against autism stereotypes:

She doesn’t talk very much, but she’s communicating constantly. Sometimes she’ll say ‘yes’, sometimes she’ll move her body in a happy or excited way, sometimes she’ll repeat something that someone else has said, and all of those things are recognized as communication. You have the stereotype of autistic people who are noncommunicative, but I’ve never met a noncommunicative autistic person. I’ve met lots of people who are communicative in nonstandard ways, and it’s really important that people know the other characters are responding to that.

(cited in Martinelli 2017)

This is a complex engagement with disability in and as representation: the various stakeholders were concerned with making this puppet an enjoyable puppet and a teaching tool for real-life autism. The challenge was to do so even in the absence of a straight autism phenotype/behaviour pattern, but in the presence of autism stereotypes that need challenging and dismantling.

To go deeper into this particular disability culture example, we could now pursue multiple approaches. A researcher could engage in close reading practices, linking particular televisual approaches to Julia’s scenes to other moments of children and puppetry, to Sesame Street’s historical particular approach to multiculturalism and modes of inclusion, or to the international take-up of Sesame Street, and its differences and similarities to other national TV cultures.

Another approach to Sesame Street’s Julia could focus on interviews with disabled children, and how they feel about characters with autistic traits, or with wheelchairs, canes or other disability markers. How does engagement with these characters, and their place in fantastical stories, shape these children’s stories about their own life paths? Someone could interview the various partners and agents that were part of the creation of Julia, and track how input, negotiation and collaboration happened in this popular cultural creation, and how disability, race, gender, immigrant status or indigeneity inflected the work place of Sesame Street.

A researcher could decide to track how popular cultural figures like super heroes or Sesame Street characters influence story-making, and create an art practice-as-research project that used familiar characters as prompts for participants’ own art making, storyboarding, puppetry approaches and generative play.

In this collection, a range of authors take up perspectives on production methods and their effects on particular cultural texts. Lockyer’s interview with disabled comedians in Britain engages this kind of approach to the infrastructures of culture making (Chapter 10), so does Hassan’s ethnographic engagement with the formation of a community choir (Chapter 11). Wilde addresses the complexities of producing new images of disability and gender on a modelling reality TV show (Chapter 5) and Ledesma discusses the difference lived experience of disability makes to blind cultural production and haptic filmmaking (Chapter 3).

Not all work in disability studies is specifically focused on disabled experience. Instead, cultural analysts and culture makers can point to the nexus of disability’s meaning complex in alignment with other historical ways of classifying humanity. My next puppetry example positions disability discourses in an intersectional conjuncture with race, gender and economic status. It focuses on JB Smoove, a US stand-up comic known from Curb Your Enthusiasm and Def Comedy Jam.

In his 2012 solo show for the comedy channel, That’s How I Dooz It, one of his acts twines together mainstream views of puppet theatre (‘for kids’), police violence and disability, all anchored in the ‘authenticity’ that black embodiment signifies in many white-dominated cultural forms. The act operates according to the offensive logic of comedy, but it also offers a progressive view of disability thematics beyond familiar forms of ‘cripping up’ (i.e. non-disabled people acting disabled, Sandahl, 2003). In this act, JB angles his hand and arm so that they look disabled, folded, withered. In the sketch, JB offers an explanation: the arm ligaments were damaged by a policeman hitting him with a baton.

JB’s comedy sketch binds this fake bio to a children’s storyline, as his supposedly damaged limb only allows him three forms of expression: the finger positions associated with the shadows of swan, rabbit and scissors. In the shadow drama he enacts, he tells the kids what happened: Swan and Rabbit go to Staples (an office supply store) and decide to nick a pair of scissors. Swan does not want to pay for the scissors, belligerently shouting: ‘I want to keep it real up in here’.

The story ends when Swan is put into prison, ingeniously signified by the back of a chair, and proceeds to get graphically raped by a microphone in a scene that addresses both stereotypes and realities of prison life. Uneasy but howling audience laughter ends the scene.

In this two-minute sketch, an engagement with shadow puppets allows for an opening into forms of shadow life, life under racist and policed regimes – the format of the hand shadow play throws shade, reveals a not un-realistic side of black childhood precarity, and the not unlikely results of bravado and teenager role-play when mixed with a racist world. Children’s worlds and adult’s sexuality mix, police violence and prison rape, complicated black trajectories and the predominantly white faces visible in the laughing audience.

This performance hinges on the presence of the embodied performer as a way of ‘permitting’ harrowing and taboo thematics (which include the presence of disability in mainstream conventions) to emerge in the registers of comedy. The signification of black embodiment authorizes the taboo themes, even though JB’s play inserts multiple moments of difference – from Rabbit’s interjection that they do actually have money to the fact that his arm reverts back to non-disabled status quite soon after the sketch. The disability status is not JB’s embodied story – but yet, denigrated bodily status as an African-American man gives force to stories that acquire a form of truth status, at least as far as necessary for the registers of TV comedy.

This example allows us to think about intercultural signification. The embodied puppet points to opportunities that surround disability’s deep cultural denigration, and to intersections with different cultural abjections. It also allows us to think about how ‘low-brow’ forms like comedy become sites of renegotiation, or get on what one of cultural studies’ founding critics, Stuart Hall, has called ‘cultural escalators’ that devalue or enhance cultural products (1981: 234).

In this collection, Bezmez and Bulut’s engagement of family, religion and health discourses on Turkish TV foregrounds these views of disability’s intersectional valency (Chapter 6), and so does Karimova, Sauers and Dakka’s engagement with proverbs and jokes in Morocco, investigating popular culture in the Arab world and the way that disability and sexuality become entangled (Chapter 7). Lim’s engagement of theatre productions in Los Angeles across Asian and Deaf perspectives focuses on cultural similarities and differences, and how these communities shape comparable perspectives on minority status in a contemporary nation state (Chapter 2).

Sesame Street and the Comedy Channel operate according to large-scale popular culture logics. My last example of cultural engagement with puppets turns to small-scale art practice, and to ethnographic observation. I engage the puppets of Fitch elron-D/Lisa Figge, a white Canadian person, ex-military, who uses the pronouns ‘they/them’ and motors around with a mobility scooter. Here is their Twitter self-description:

I am a becoming movement from numbness with puppet aesthetic for helping manage paradigm’s shift.

(Twitter self-description)

Fitch’s puppets are vaguely anthropomorphic, often made out of colourful cloth. They usually have two or three limbs that can be moved via strings – hardly ever four. One leg-like protuberance, one arm-like one, is a more regular assemblage. The puppets are soft and malleable, and a delight to touch – smooth and lovingly stitched up.

They use these puppets to explore new relations to embodiment, movement scope, etc., similar to what UK theatre artists Laura Purcell-Gates and Emma Fisher have named in their own work as ‘an exploration into the world a unique puppet creates through its movements’ (2017: 364). In Fitch’s world, it is less the unique world of the puppet that is at stake, but the highlighting of the human body/puppet body hybrid that creates new opportunities for understanding potential movement patterns. This aligns with another insight fromPurcell-Gates and Fisher’s workshop, when participants create their own puppets:

participants assume that any deviation from the norm in their puppet’s body, which they construct during the workshop, is a flaw. They usually show us this ‘flaw’ and ask us how to fix it, at which point we encourage them instead to explore how this particular puppet wants to move, and suggest that a puppet’s perceived flaws often become a defining feature of the puppet’s emerging life and movement.

(2017: 368)

This is the motor at the heart of Fitch’s puppets too, engaging the movement potential of difference, of the flaw, in the way that a three-limbed puppet falls outside the registers of human iconography and becomes something new. As puppet makers know, more or less anything can be animated, can come to life, and it’s easy and exciting to walk on the human/other borderline.

The puppets also allow Fitch to continue to make sculptural work: no longer able to manipulate larger pieces of material, the puppets allow for small-scale work and easy manipulation. In the press release to accompany one of their puppet exhibits in 2014, they say, ‘I want people who come to the exhibit just to slow down, I want them to experience their own bodies as they engage with the puppets’. One could align these descriptions of making art with concepts like crip time (see McDonald, publication date unknown, likely late 1980s) or interdependence, both concepts with much currency in international disability art practices.

In the performance I witnessed (in my Disability Culture undergraduate class at the University of Michigan) Fitch worked with a number of my students. They were a visiting artist and had agreed to take some of my students on a mini-artist masterclass journey. In the concluding session to this masterclass sequence, they laid out colourful soft blankets on the floor, preparing a nest for themselves. They then lowered themself from their scooter to the floor, and began to assemble their puppet crew. They showed a movie of their puppets from one of their gallery installations, engaging gallery participants and allowing people to play. In one of the scenes, a woman with very high heels is shown next to the dancing puppet, moving up and down on its strings, two curious limb configurations in swing with each other. The video invites meditation, taking time, being playful with new options for limb movement. High heels/twitching limbs/small steps/big steps from others walking by: different rhythms are at play with one another.

This pixie-like attention to slowing time and opening curious gazes to non-normative and even non-realist embodiment is at the heart of Fitch’s show: the point is less to make people with one leg ‘normal’ but instead to open up little avenues into ‘otherwises’ not anchored in realist embodiment, in the authenticity of a particular body. Fitch has four limbs, even if some work in non-normative ways and drop in and out of strength and surety.

The installation created an atmosphere of curiosity and playfulness in our classroom, as most of my students migrated onto the floor. At one point, students offered beautifully coloured cloth bands to each other, as fastenings between two humans – humans who then echoed the puppets in their fabric covering, and in their manner of animation.

With the puppets at its centre, our space shifted reality, into an Alice-in-Wonderland space, but without losing touch with the reality of Fitch’s lack of access in their own home community (in Canada) and the complexities of moving as a disabled person in a disabling world. In their framing remarks, Fitch pointed again and again to the history of exclusions and painful rejections that marked their way through Canadian and US art spaces and educational institutions. In their interview given in a Canadian newspaper, they say: ‘We live in an ableist culture which prefers able-bodied people and dissuades people with disabilities from participating equally’ (The Whig 2014).

The ‘protest action’ of the puppets does not offer a realistic view of Fitch’s personal and embodied struggle. There is no puppet that tries to get up a steep wheelchair ramp, or sits dejected outside an inaccessible gallery space. That’s not the kind of aesthetics Fitch invites. Instead, in this happening, 25 young adults find themselves in a topsy-turvy world, some literally bound to an other, some playing with strings, action and reaction, watching a fabric puppet dance, and becoming aware of the web they all assemble, the way that each action here ripples through the whole, in interdependent ways.

Here, we are experiencing disability arts and culture as a magical thing, as a break in the regiment of university institutions or art audiences. We move from expected habitus – sitting orderly on chairs – onto the ground, and audience members explore new rules for engagement with one another.

One could follow this kind of work further, seeing it as a site-specific art-based exploration of environmental rules. What ways of being are valued and reflected in a particular environment? Which are not? How have histories of exclusions shaped particular shared cultural worlds? How can art practice and its particular ways of creating knowledge and sensation allow access to new insights?

To engage these issues of competing and challenged stereotypes, researchers can focus on interviews to gain insight into the complex associations people make as they engage new representation. This is what Hodges, Scullion and Jackson do in their interview-based assessment of culture change around Olympic Game TV coverage (Chapter 8). Likewise, Ellis focuses on disabled audiences of crime dramas that feature disability, using interviews to tease out different layers of pleasure, alignment and push-back (Chapter 9). New complexities emerge when we move away from single-authored textural analysis to a way of thinking about cultural negotiation, abjection and pleasure in a more distributed field of interview analysis.

In more art-based frames, Nakajima shows how cultural contact across German and Japanese cultural specificity can unfold in the framework of a particular theatrical production for which she served as dramaturge (Chapter 13). Durham-Wall offers a phenomenologically dense reading of a dance collaboration between the US-based Heidi Latzky Company and visual artist Lisa Bufano (Chapter 4). Kuppers offers a multivoiced community arts project, disabled people and their allies going swimming together, which illuminates multiple categories of difference and their artful negotiation in an eco-poetic framework (Chapter 14). In her analysis of a graphic novel by Renée French, Honeyman shows how a different kind of intercultural connection across animality can lead to a polyvocality that makes pain texts and invisible disability accessible to audiences (Chapter 1).

In the ethnographic/participant-observer analysis of the last puppet engagement above, we are in a crip culture moment, and experience embodied methods for knowledge creation. By writing about ‘crip’ in this sentence, I let the material come closer to myself, and I signal this in the language I use. I am disabled, and I identify with the subcultural investment characterized by the language of ‘crip’ – a more radical, oppositional, sarcastic and in-group language use than the word ‘disability’. The authors in this collection chose different ways of navigating identification and difference, and they do not come from any one cultural formation around disability. Many do not openly identify in some way with disability, or mark their researcher being in any way. The conventions of mainstream academia hold against this kind of standpoint epistemology, or phenomenologically focused research. But in a collection focused on a subaltern way of being in the world, one often associated with precarity, welfare cuts under austerity regimes and lack of access, it is politically important to include writings by researchers, makers and artists who actively identify as disabled. It was also important to have contributions that reflect in depth about what it means, for instance, to be a non-disabled therapist working with disabled clients in a nature-focused art environment, as in Burrows’ essay on autistic and neurotypical world habitation (Chapter 12).

Conclusion

This collection offers a cross-cultural snapshot of contemporary practice around disability arts and culture research, with a particular emphasis on international cultural studies methods as they have gained traction in the field. My puppetry examples offer a way of reading the different knowledge projects and foci at work in contemporary research, always bound back to actual products and actual creative interventions into the conventions of very particular frameworks (here, educational children’s TV, comedy or experimental art practice). This kind of specificity and grounding defines cultural research methods.

Disability cultural studies can pay attention to analyse cultural practice not only from the perspective of a single reader’s reception practice, but in the context of wider frames, whether accessed through discursive research or qualitative methods. Arts-based research can open individual narratives to chance, drift and play, and to new perspectives undreamt of by the initiator. The material collected here offers a snapshot of this kind of research, the work in progress that allows us to think more capaciously about disability’s embedment in our cultural world(s).

May the collection spur new developments, and ever widening circles of inclusion and world transformation as we all enlarge our imaginations of what it means to be cultural producers, participants and audiences.

References

Fanon, Frantz (1991), Black Skin White Masks, New York: Grove Press.

Hall, Stuart (1981), People’s History and Socialist Theory, Routledge: London.

Martinelli, Marissa (2017), ‘An autism advocate explains how she helped Sesame Street create its new autistic muppet’, Slate, 12 April 2017.

McDonald, Anne (n.d), ‘Crip time’, Anne McDonald Centre website, http://www.annemcdonaldcentre.org.au/crip-time. Accessed 1 July 2018.

Purcell-Gates, Laura and Fisher, Emma (2017), ‘Puppetry as reinforcement or rupture of cultural perceptions of the disabled body’, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, 22:3, pp. 363–72.

Radway, Janice (1984), Reading the Romance, Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press.

Sandahl, Carrie (2003), ‘Queering the crip or cripping the queer?: Intersections of queer and crip identities in solo autobiographical performance’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 9:1, pp. 25–56.

The Whig (2014), ‘Puppets give artist a voice’, 3 October, http://www.thewhig.com/2014/10/03/puppets-give-artist-a-voice--n-art-woman-calls-exhibit-a-way-to-experience-her-own-disability. Accessed 1 July 2018.

Williams, Raymond (1983), ‘Culture’, Keywords, rev. ed., New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 87–93.

Texts and Complexities

Chapter 1

Pain proxies, migraine and invisible disability in Renée French’s H Day

Susan Honeyman

I have given a name to my pain and call it ‘dog’. It is just as faithful, just as obtrusive and shameless, just as entertaining, just as clever as any other dog – and I can scold it and vent my bad mood on it, as others do with their dogs, servants, and wives.

(Nietzsche [1887] 1974: 249–50)

Much has been written on the suitability of comics as a medium for articulating ‘disabled’ experience and educating readers about it.¹ In H Day (2010), Renée French does both with startling originality and power, made all the more challenging by the invisibility of the impairment (migraine) that is her subject. She overcomes this obstacle by utilizing wordlessness, separate points of view, connecting them with overlapping imagery and theme, externalizing focalization, and promoting reader-identification through an empathetic yet buffered representation of suffering. During a book signing at the Strand bookstore, French described her book as ‘a puzzle’, and certainly it demands many revisitations to secure a sense of what is going on. In my reading, I will try to illuminate a few pieces of that puzzle, stressing the significance of the work to understanding not just migraine and invisible disability, but also her contribution to an even more pervasive traditional iconography – man’s best friend as pain proxy.

To quickly move beyond Nietzsche’s curious prioritizing of ‘dogs, servants, and wives’ in the epigraph above, I would like to discuss the initially more unexpected identification of pain with a loyal and abusable pet, a canine representation of his invisible discomfort. Nietzsche’s imaginary dog, or pain proxy, helps to illuminate the later appearance and significance of animals in external- izing images of invisible disability in comics, providing a history of which will help me to better situ- ate my appreciation of Renée French’s H Day, a wordless text on migraine experience that follows the phases of a migraine attack in segments called ‘stages’, each double-spread containing a some- what literal rendering of a migraineur throughout an attack on the left-hand side, while on the right we enter the migraineur’s imagination to experience that character’s (and French’s own) coping visualizations. French has explained, ‘as the headache is happening on the left, the stuff on the right is happening inside his head’ (Matheson). In the fantasy landscape, the migraineur’s stand-in and ultimately the main character of the piece, who suffers but will actively escape the onslaught, is, significantly, a dog.

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche equates his ego with a dog (cited in Acampora 2004: 55). Debra B. Bergoffen explains that Nietzsche

[…] contrasts a ‘cat-egotism’ with a ‘dog-egotism.’ More recently domesticated than dogs, cats were never herd animals and have never regarded humans as ‘masters.’ So much the better, says Nietzsche, as he disparages the dog as ‘that lazy, tail-wagging parasite which has become ‘dog-like’ only through being the slave of man’.

(Acampora 2004: 252)

One can assume, then, that his equating of pain with a being he views as so debased is a desperate declaration of domination. Critics often reduce Nietzsche’s ‘dog’ to being about anything from ennui to angst, but few give the most obvious and straightforward reading much shrift. Nietzsche, as a migraineur and with later illness as well, struggled intensely and frequently with pain – real pain that is not necessary to metaphorically mask² to understand. His proclamation is one of trying to master his pain, and he is both angry and amused (all the more interesting if you consider this in the light of his considerable use of opium at the time of this writing, a typical course of treatment for migraineurs in his day). In ‘Dogs, domestication, and the ego’, Gary Shapiro argues

How liberating it would be if we could see our ‘pain’ – the sum of our resentments and frustrations, for example – as a dog that frequently amuses us but needs to be kept in its place and can serve as an outlet for our bad temper. This would be far superior to seeing ourselves as identical with the pain, and the same holds true for our relation to the ego, which follows us about like a dog.

(Acampora 2004: 55)

More importantly, Kathleen Marie Higgins pegs it, ‘by seeing one’s pain as a dog, one can take attitudes toward it, and not simply be it’ (2000: 108, original emphasis). In H Day, Renée French allows her reader to imagine projecting pain onto a sympathetic dog character as a way of disclaiming that pain as our own.

In doing so, French playfully falls in line with a curious tradition that can be found in ritual and art – viewing animals as pain proxies. Dogs in comics occasionally take on our pain, and even allow us to love them and laugh at them at the same time – a kind of therapeutic sacrifice. If you consider the Peanuts strip in which Charlie Brown dramatically berates Snoopy in language reminiscent of tragedy, you will also note the comic nonchalance of the persevering beagle (9 December 1950). Schulz highlights the somewhat ridiculous ways in which dogs serve as scapegoats and ideals of innocence at the same time. Iggy Pop plays with the more servile implications of this imaginary sacrifice in the lyrics to ‘I wanna be your dog’ by the Stooges. The narrator of the song does not want to play fetch or go to the park – he wants to take a gritty, grovelling and submissive (perhaps feign- ing and sexual, but submissive) position to the addressee of the lyrics, exemplifying the fantasy work fictional dogs are projected to accomplish for us – not only to suffer for us, but to want it as well, thus absolving the master of any guilt. It is this submissiveness and servility that dominate pop-cultural characterizations of dogs and help to explain Nietzsche’s ‘pet name’ for his pain. It also helps to indicate the complexity of our adoration