​
Disability and Imagination

How Molly Joyce recasts disability
​as a source for creative transformation
​


"I wish to recast disability from a fixed, static imperfection to that of a fluid, creative potential: a potential that is not concerned with able or disabled, formed or deformed, functional or non-functional, but rather all the in-betweens. In-betweens that lie within the pillars of possible and impossible, fixed and fluid, static and moving; and that emerge when we are not concerned with the ability of a body or the normality of a body but with the imaginary of a body."

​- Molly  Joyce, composer and musician, in TEDtalk below

There is much that we cannot change.  We cannot change what has happened to us.  We cannot change the laws of physics and chemistry.   We cannot change our family of origin.  We cannot change where we were born.  And if we are physically impaired, many of us cannot change our bodies so that they conform perfectly to socially conditioned standards of what 'normal' is.  Even if we wanted to, and even if those standards are themselves destructive and arbitrary, which so often they are.  But we can change our way of  understanding what has happened to us; and, in so doing, create new selves and even, in a way, new bodies: imaginary bodies.  We can then dance these new bodies and sing them.  And we can do this again and again, each day, moving beyond static images of perfection to what Molly Joyce calls "fluid, creative potential." 

​This ongoing movement, not always easy, is what process philosophers and theologians call creative transformation.  Process theologians imagine the healing spirit at work in the world as a lure toward such transformation.  Molly Joyce gives flesh and sound to this idea.   The purpose of this page is to introduce process philosophers and theologians to her work and also to the work of one of her mentors, the pioneer in disability studies: Rosemary Garland-Thomson.  They are testaments to what we believe and inspirations for our work.

​- Jay McDaniel, July 18, 2020
​


Listen and See
​

​
​Composer and performer Molly Joyce’s music has been described as “serene power” (The New York Times), written to “superb effect” (The Wire), and “impassioned” (The Washington Post). Her work is primarily concerned with disability as a creative source. She has an impaired left hand from a previous car accident, and the primary vehicle in her pursuit is her electric vintage toy organ, an instrument she bought on eBay which suits her body and engages her disability on a compositional and performative level. Her debut full-length album, Breaking and Entering, featuring toy organ, voice, and electronic sampling of both sources was released in June 2020 on New Amsterdam Records, and has been praised by New Sounds as “a powerful response to something (namely, physical disability of any kind) that is still too often stigmatized, but that Joyce has used as a creative prompt.”

​National Sawdust Festival: https://live.nationalsawdust.org/event/molly-joyce


The New Virtuosity
​

​One of the hallmarks of many different kinds of music performance—whether it’s a classical piano recital, a jazz combo in a club, or an arena rock show—is the demonstration of extraordinary physical feats on musical instruments. A cult of virtuosity has perpetuated the belief that the harder something is to play, and hence the fewer people who are able to play it, the better the music, and that the rare specimens of humanity who are able to play such music have special superhuman powers. At the same time, embedded in the word virtuoso is the word virtuous, implying that the rest of us who can’t scale these heights are somehow lacking in moral goodness.

​Composer/performer Molly Joyce explained to us when we visited her in Washington, D.C. at the Halcyon Arts Lab, where she’s in residence this year, why perpetuating the notion that only a small select few are physically worthy enough excludes most people from the experience of making and ultimately enjoying art:

- Frank J. Oteriti, Freb. 2020, New Music Box, "Molly Joyce: Strength in Vulnerability"
​
​


The Mind-Body Relation: Molly Joyce
​
​Down and Out - Program Note

​Down and Out is inspired by the concept of one's mind-body relationship and addressing that relationship with an impairment such as a physical disability. Therefore for me personally, reconciling this relationship involved changing my perception of something that I thought was never going to change, namely my physically-impaired left hand. For most of my life since the car accident that injured it it had felt like something attached to my body rather than my body itself, however more recently I feel that I have been able become "one" again with my mind-body relationship through adjusting how I personally perceive my left hand and its inclusion in my body. And thus I had to allow those altered perceptions in my mind to travel "down and out" of my full body in order to feel one again. I feel that this phrase, while traditionally of a more negative connotation, can also be of a positive connotation in that it can allow for one to free themselves of past burdens, and this is reflected musically with the piano part gradually descending while the violin part virtually does not change until the very end, so at the completion of the piece both parts have changed.

​Down and Out was written in the fall and winter of 2016 in New Haven, CT, and was commissioned as part of The Response Project’s “On Behalf” commissioning series. The works id dedicated to pianist Brianna Matzke and violinist Hajnal Pivnick. 

​
 Rosemarie Garland-Thomson
​

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson is a disability justice and culture thought leader, bioethicist, teacher, and humanities scholar. Her 2016 editorial, “Becoming Disabled,” was the inaugural article in the ongoing weekly series in the New York Times about disability by people living with disabilities.

She is a professor of English and bioethics at Emory University, where she teaches disability studies, bioethics, American literature and culture, and feminist theory. Her work develops the field of critical disability studies in the health humanities to bring forward disability access, inclusion, and identity to a broad range of institutions and communities.
​
She is co-editor of About Us: Essays from the New York Times about Disability by People with Disabilities (forthcoming) and the author of Staring: How We Look and several other books. Her current project is Embracing Our Humanity: A Bioethics of Disability and Health.

​-- from Emory University Website


Excerpts from Becoming Disabled in NY Times editorial
​

Disability is everywhere once you start noticing it

A person without a disability may recognize someone using a wheelchair, a guide dog or a prosthetic limb, or someone with Down syndrome, but most don’t conceptualize these people as having a shared social identity and a political status. “They” merely seem to be people to whom something unfortunate has happened, for whom something has gone terribly wrong. The one thing most people do know about being disabled is that they don’t want to be that.
​
Yet disability is everywhere once you start noticing it. A simple awareness of who we are sharing our public spaces with can be revelatory. Wheelchair users or people with walkers, hearing aids, canes, service animals, prosthetic limbs or breathing devices may seem to appear out of nowhere, when they were in fact there all the time.

- Rosemary Garland-Thomson
Defining Disability

The World Health Organization defines disability as an umbrella term that encompasses impairments, activity limitations and participation restrictions that reflect the complex interaction between “features of a person’s body and features of the society in which he or she lives.” The Americans With Disabilities Act tells us that disability is “a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities.”

​- Rosemary Garland-Thomson
Disability Growth Areas

Disability growth areas — if you will — include diagnostic categories such as depression, anxiety disorders, anorexia, cancers, traumatic brain injuries, attention-deficit disorder, autoimmune disease, spinal cord injuries, autistic spectrum disabilities and dementia. Meanwhile, whole categories of disability and populations of people with certain disabilities have vanished or diminished significantly in the 20th century with improved public health measures, disease prevention and increased public safety.

​- Rosemary Garland-Thomson
Learning to be Disabled

​Because almost all of us will experience disability sometime in our lives, having to navigate one early in life can be a great advantage...Still, most Americans don’t know how to be disabled. Few of us can imagine living with a disability or using the technologies that disabled people often need. Since most of us are not born into disability but enter into it as we travel through life, we don’t get acculturated the way most of us do in our race or gender. Yet disability, like any challenge or limitation, is fundamental to being human — a part of every life. Clearly, the border between “us” and “them” is fragile. We just might be better off preparing for disability than fleeing from it.

- Rosemary Garland-Thomson
Open Horizons