Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introducing disability aesthetics -- The aesthetics of human disqualification -- What can disability studies learn from the culture wars? -- Disability and art vandalism -- Trauma art : injury and wounding in the media age -- Words stare like a glass eye : disability in literary and visual studies -- Conclusion : disability in the mirror of art.

"Disability Aesthetics is the first attempt to theorize the representation of disability in modern art and visual culture. It claims that the modern in art is perceived as disability, and that disability is evolving into an aesthetic value in itself. It argues that the essential arguments at the heart of the American culture wars in the late twentieth century involved the rejection of disability both by targeting certain artworks as "sick" and by characterizing these artworks as representative of a sick culture." "The book also tracks the seminal role of National Socialism in perceiving the powerful connection between modern art and disability. It probes a variety of central aesthetic questions, producing a new understanding of art vandalism, an argument about the centrality of wounded bodies to global communication, and a systematic reading of the use put to aesthetics to justify the oppression of disabled people."--Jacket.