Cripping the Lens: Gender, Disability, and the Politics of Visibility
Syracuse, upstate New York, USA. Ruby, a twenty-year-old woman with Down’s Syndrome, stands on her single bed in proud assertion, hands on hips, face divided by a wide smile. Her bedroom walls are flanked in pale pink, displaying colourful drawings of rainbows and trees and a poster for Beauty and the Beast. Dressed in a Cinderella princess gown, Ruby is revelling in her girlhood. It is not a limitation but a site for “imagination, pride, and possibility”. She is taking up space, unashamed of and uninhibited by her disability. This photograph encapsulates This is Gender’s Cripping the Lens digital exhibition perfectly.
‘Ruby’ – Md Zobayer Hossain Joati, 2025
Launched by Global 50/50 on the 22nd of July, in collaboration with international feminist human rights organisation CREA and Canada’s National Access Art Centre, which provides training and opportunities to artists with disabilities, This is Gender’s digital exhibition explores the intersection between gender and disability. Out of eight hundred international submissions, fifty were selected for the final collection and five were selected as the winners of its key themes; how institutions are designed to exclude disabled people, how disabled people navigate space, care as a practice of agency, intimacy, and collective survival, the body and the mind as a source of knowledge, and disabled life as a powerful reimagining force. Global 50/50 is a gender justice and health equity research initiative, working towards gender health equality. This is Gender, the branch of Global 50/50 that directed the exhibition, emerged in 2019 in response to the general lack of diversity in the representation of gender in global health. Further motivated by COVID-19, global protest movements, and our increasingly visual age, This is Gender declares that representation matters and is seeking a new frame through which to visualise health. Gender and disability overlap and consequently shape individual experience of health, treatment, relationships, self-esteem, and many other aspects of life. This is Gender uses art and photography to highlight this overlooked intersection and to tell unheard stories as an act of resistance. Their exhibition Cripping the Lens, introduced as part of Disability Pride Month, which is also highly overlooked in public life, is a shining example of their mission
The Past in Your Hands by Jaime Prada, the winner of the ‘Claiming Space, Shaping Place’, how disabled people navigate space, category is thoroughly deserving of its prize. In the British Museum, a blind woman reaches out to a sculpture, searching for understanding. Most of the image is shadowed; the light focuses on her hands – her instrument of knowledge, connection, and navigation. She is fighting for access to culture. The woman’s tactile connection with the sculpture is rare. She did not encounter barriers or museum guards blocking her path to knowledge. Prada’s image highlights the darkness disabled people are kept in, which is perpetuated by a lack of understanding of disabled lived experience and a mass neglect of accessibility.
‘The Past in Your Hands’ – Jaime Prada, 2024
Ryosuke, a deaf transgender man, reclines in a bathtub in Hong Kong. His hands cradle his head, his elbows are outstretched. His body is in a position of relaxation but his face wears an expression of strong determination. He fought through puberty and unwelcome bodily changes without a language to express his dysphoria. Now, he proudly boasts his breast removal scars as a “testament to survival” and his journey to self-discovery and self-determination. MsFe and Eunie Chau’s The Blessing of Trans Scars was taken in 2022 but is even more poignant today where transgender rights and acceptance are being rolled back, from US President Trump’s removal of transgender acknowledgement from the Stonewall website, ban on transgender women and girls from female sport, and denial of gender-affirming care to those under 19 to the Supreme Court’s ruling that the legal definition of woman shall be based on biological sex here in the UK.
‘The Blessing of Trans Scars’ – MsFe and Eunice Chau, 2022
Cripping the Lens transverses art of lonely survival and art of loving solidarity. Gina Meneses’ When the Mountain Won’t Move, Healthcare Must, winner of the Systems of Power, Structures of Exclusion category, is full of the deep, rich colours of mountains and grassland. A spotlight appears on a woman and a healthcare worker in the remote Banaue Rice Terraces. Care and treatment has been brought to a woman who cannot reach it through the dedication of the medic. This act is one of solidarity and intimacy and the photograph is charged with it.
‘When Mountains Won’t Move, Healthcare Must’ – Gina Meneses, 2023
In a dated classroom in Togo, containing only dust-gathering blackboards and a football, intimacy and solidarity between teenage peers is captured. The picture is shadowed and dark. In Kodjo’s region, disabled people like him are often subject to violence and erasure. The only light emanates from a window beside him as he helps his classmate with homework. Kodjo, his intelligence and his kindness are seen and acknowledged by the digital spectators and his friend. Kodjo is recognised as more than his wheelchair. As a student, as a teacher, as a friend.
‘Kindness’ – Antonio Aragon Renuncio, 2019
Cripping the Lens does not only focus on the pain, struggle, exclusion, and discrimination experienced through disability and ageing; space is made for joy. In Mexico City, husband and wife embrace each other in a state of undress. They are in a world of their own, seemingly unaware of Jenny Bautista Media taking their photo. The black and white image mitigates the background – their being together is all that matters. Nothing is competing with their touch for our attention. Isa beams as her husband Taro holds her, she places her hands lovingly on his cheeks. This photograph confronts the taboo of older people’s and disabled people’s passions and desires without fear. Both Isa and Taro live with disabilities and care for each other in an act of gendered solidarity through sharing the relationship’s emotional and physical labour. Acompañamiento y Cariño, winner of Relations of Care, Acts of Resistance, is proof that tenderness and affection are universal, “fundamental to the human experience”, including those with disabilities, and are the duty of neither men nor women alone.
‘Acompañamiento y Cariño’ – Jenny Bautista Media, 2025
Across all images and art displayed in Cripping the Lens, the focus is on strength. Vulnerability and disability is not framed with pity but resistance.
Words by Rosie Nowosielski