Book Monograph

Hospital Aesthetics: Disability, Medicine, Activism

2025

Image from Hospital Aesthetics: Disability, Medicine, Activism
Bibliographic Reference

Amanda Cachia, Hospital Aesthetics: Disability, Medicine, Activism, Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2025.

Hospital Aesthetics: Disability, Medicine, Activism argues that contemporary disabled artists are offering a new hospital aesthetics, taking health and care into their own hands and body-minds. Hospital aesthetics is defined as artwork that explores the ever-subjective experience of being sick and ill, set apart from and outside of a clinical and therapeutic setting, and in opposition to the medical model of disability. This hospital aesthetics is not interested in art therapy’s theoretical concern with the well-being of hospital patients, but rather, it wants to challenge the oppressive master narratives within the medical model of disability, a philosophy in which disability is bad and must be fixed or corrected. In doing the work of hospital aesthetics, contemporary disabled artists are contributing to a type of disability activism that can improve both mainstream bioethics and ableist museum and gallery culture. This is because the work of contemporary disabled artists extends the imperative of decolonizing the gallery into the act of decolonizing the hospital; the artists I examine work against the medical industrial complex’s tendency to treat disabled bodies as specimens and, eventually, archives. Instead, their 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.