Exoticization, Objectification, Liberation?

Aimee Mullins for Dazed and Confused

In 1998, Alexander McQueen and Nick Knight collaborated on a shoot called
“Accessible”, which featured eight disabled models. One of these models was Aimee Mullins, a celebrity and athlete who has had both of her legs amputated at the knee. In Aimee Mullins for Dazed & Confused, she is looking far into the distance while pulling up the “skeletal frame of a full length skirt” (Victoria and Albert Museum, 2003), showing off her prosthetic legs and looking remarkably similar to a mannequin. McQueen and Knight wanted to disrupt normative standards of beauty and convention by centering Mullins’s prosthetic legs rather than attempting to conceal them, which is the frequent experience of disabled people who use prosthetics or mobility aids. However, in attempting this, they ended up exoticizing Mullins and her prosthetics
and turning her into something other than human, alienating her because of her disability. This paper will explore how this artwork navigates the complex terrain of disability aesthetics and disability representation, ultimately offering insight into the shifting boundaries of visibility, desirability, and embodiment.

Aimee Mullins for Dazed & Confused incorporates disability as an aesthetic value through accentuating her prosthetics rather than attempting to hide them. It is extremely common for photographers, artists, and disabled people themselves to hide or not include mobility aids or prosthetic limbs in art, due to the social taboos that still surround disability. An example of this would be Harriet McBryde Johnson’s story about being photographed for the New York Times, where the photographer stated she was ““hiding” behind her wheelchair” (McBryde Johnson, 2005, pg. 198) and being dishonest by not showing the real her. This impulse to erase or downplay visible signs of disability reinforces the idea that disabled bodies are shameful, incomplete, or in need of concealment.Aimee Mullins for Dazed & Confused instead embraces and emphasizes Mullins’s disability, with her lifting her skirt and directing the viewer’s eye directly towards her prosthetic limbs. This disrupts conventional artistic norms that often marginalize or erase disabled bodies in the name of aesthetic “purity” or perfection. In doing so this photograph reframes her prosthetics, and therefore disability as a whole, as a generative force in art and self-representation, rather than symbols of loss and limitation.

While