Balding female bears at Germany’s Leipzig Zoo are baffling vets working to figure out the condition’s cause— especially since the normally fluffy brown bears should now be growing a thicker coat to keep warm during the winter.
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Igather writes here that, “I have nothing to say other than, wow, this photo is extremely disturbing. I feel like I’m seeing something that I shouldn’t. And now, so are you.” My immediate reaction to this image in sarahspy’s post was “oh god, that’s so beautiful,” which had already brought up all sorts of thoughts before igather posted.
In disability theory, “impairment” is the name for the condition of the body, “disabled” the name for what society does to the impaired. Recently, however, I have been thinking about the aesthetics of impairment. Tobin Siebers is about to publish a book on this subject, particularly on the aesthetics of disabled people in modernist art; I saw him speak at Temple University recently, and my thoughts are still utterly muddled. Is there a way to recuperate, aestheticize, our feelings of “seeing what we shouldn’t”? Is that a legitimate pursuit? What’s the difference between honest appreciation of what I find beautiful and fetishization of the strange or weird? Does finding the impaired body beautiful complicate the process of healing, or invalidate our efforts to “fix” the body? I honestly don’t know.
