The performative body of disabled women: Toward the politics of visibility in China

Abstract

Disabled people are largely invisible in China, and disabled women are even more so. Therefore, it is crucial for disabled Chinese women to mobilize their performative bodies to gain visibility in public and resist marginalized and stigmatized identities. This article focuses on ‘Disabled Sisters Best’, an activist group for disabled women in China, as a case to explain how the disabled performative body can provide a site of visualization of disabled Chinese women, why this is feasible and the implications. In particular, this article takes the body as a point of departure to examine disabled women’s bodily experience, body images and social media usage, and explain how their practices of mediatizing the performative body indicate a sort of politics of visibility that may possibly alter how we see disability, sexuality and identity, in addition to altering how they are practiced and what they can be.