The Whole Mess

This commentary is a reflection on poems Folsom Follies and Scartography, both of which now have original art that I’ve created attached.

Brueggemann (2013)¹ asserts that when disability is claimed as a “positive identity marker,” it enables the creation of art that celebrates human variation (p. 286). Claiming crip as an identity has allowed me to create from pride and embodiment rather than repair or recovery. My poems, Folsom Follies and Scartography, are acts of crip life-writing that explore sexuality, pain, and the body as sites of resistance and beauty. Together, they reclaim narrative control from systems that label and contain disabled lives.

Crip poetics and disability aesthetics aim to unsettle notions of beauty, desire, and value. As Brueggemann (2013) explains, beauty is political because it dictates which bodies are deemed beautiful (p. 296). Folsom Follies embraces the erotic disabled body, challenging assumptions of asexuality and compulsory heterosexuality. Two queer crips use their mobility devices in erotic choreography, turning what nondisabled culture often marks as tragedy into crip joy. Ferris (2007)² notes that crip poetry enables disabled people to control the gaze and its terms. Set at an open-air leather festival, the poem transforms voyeurism into an exhibitionist reclamation of disabled eroticism.

Chandler (2018)³ writes that disabled people have always shown that “a different sort of world” is possible (p. 458). Folsom Follies embodies this possibility with a tone of unapologetic joy and sexuality, pushing back against tropes of desexualization or fetish. It aligns with Kuppers & Wakefield (2009)⁴, who emphasize “foregrounding physical needs and bodily behavior with pride and enjoyment” (p. 270).

If Folsom Follies celebrates erotic power, Scartography is a cartography of trauma, pain, and survival. Each stanza maps a scar as a landmark of lived experience. Writing these into poetic form becomes testimony and reclamation, a way to name myself before others do. This echoes Sandahl (2009)⁵ who notes that disabled artists replace stereotypes with life-based storytelling (p. 265).

Petra Kuppers (2008)⁶ provides a powerful framework for understanding this kind of scar poetics. She writes that scars “trace ambivalences, shifting meaning, and the transformation of personal material into poetic labor” (p. 141). For Kuppers, the scar is not just a mark of wounding but a “site of production, a shifting terrain, a trajectory” (p. 148). In Scartography, this terrain becomes both intimate and political. My body, scarred, especially post-mastectomy and reconstructed⁷, becomes a canvas and a critique. The accompanying visual art, with one hand opening to the heart and one skyward, insists on being seen, echoing Siebers’s (2006)⁸ rejection of the healthy body as the only aesthetic ideal (p. 64).

Kuppers (2008) also reminds us that scars are “good for telling of battles,” and are deeply embedded in the language of disability poetry as both memory and metaphor (p. 143). She writes that “crip culture often has trouble acknowledging the pain of living within labels… pride can get in the way” (p. 144). I experience this tension in navigating “disabled pretty”, a form of aesthetic privilege that complicates how my work is received. As Siebers (2006) observes, “all bodies are not created equal when it comes to aesthetic response” (p. 63). This contradiction becomes a central tension of my crip aesthetic: how can someone scarred and in pain be desirable?

Ultimately, both Folsom Follies and Scartography aim not to correct misrepresentations, but to expand them. As Chandler (2018) warns, it’s not about replacing “bad” portrayals with “good ones” (p. 459), but about embracing complexity. Fox (2021)⁹ calls disability aesthetics a way to express the disabled bodymind beyond suffering or tragedy (p. 154). This is also the hope Kuppers (2008) holds: that scars can be “connections to more than self,” a way toward “another magic, another hope” (p. 145). My work strives to hold eroticism, pain, and joy in the same breath; to map, in both word and image, what it means to be scarred and whole.

1. Brueggemann, B. (2013). Disability Studies/Disability Culture. In M. L. Wehmeyer (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology and Disability (1st ed., pp. 279–300). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195398786.013.013.0019 ↩︎
2. Ferris, J. (2007). Crip Poetry, Or How I Learned to Love the Liimp. Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature. ↩︎
3. Chandler, E. (2018). Disability Art and Re-Worlding Possibilities. A/b: Auto/Biography Studies, 33(2), 458–463. https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2018.1445599 ↩︎
4. Kuppers, P., & Wakefield, M. (2009). Disability Culture. In Encyclopedia of American Disability History, Volumes 1-3 (1st ed). Facts On File, Incorporated. ↩︎
5. Sandahl, C. (2009). Disability art and artistic expression. In Encyclopedia of American disability history. Facts On File. ↩︎
6. Kuppers, P. (2008). Scars in disability culture poetry: Towards connection. Disability & Society, 23(2), 141–150. https://doi.org/10.1080/09687590701841174 ↩︎
7. An in-depth look at the disability aesthetics of breast cancer specifically is beyond the scope of this paper, but I would highly recommend reading Ehlers, N. (2015). The SCAR Project: Disability Aesthetics of Dis-ease in the Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies. ↩︎
8. Siebers, T. (2006). Disability Aesthetics. Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, 7(2), 63–73. ↩︎
9. Fox, A. (2021). The Rise of Disability aesthetics. In The Routledge companion to beauty politics (pp. 147–156). Routledge. ↩︎