Hospital Aesthetics: Rescripting Medical Images of Disability

This talk is based on an overview of my second book project, Hospital Aesthetics: Rescripting Medical Images of Disability. In the book, I argue that contemporary disabled artists are offering a new hospital aesthetics by taking health and care into their own hands and bodyminds. These artists are considering their lives on their own terms, outside of clinical and therapeutic settings. Hospital aesthetics shows a different side to disabled bodies that attempts to undo the social and cultural impacts the hospital has had on its disabled patients, both historically and in the contemporary moment. The book will contribute to a radical activism that reveals the inadequacies of the medical industrial complex. The talk will provide a discussion of numerous artworks to feature in the different chapters of the book that focus on charting immunocompromised bodies, disabling medical assistive devices, sensual hospital aesthetics, crip networks of care, and alt medicine.