LIMN (verb) 1. Paint or draw (a picture) or portrait; portray a subject. 2. Portray or represent (esp. a person) in words: the portrait limned the poem. 3. To suffuse or highlight (something) with a bright colour or light: A crescent moon limned the night sky.
LIMB (noun) 1. A projecting part of a person’s or animal’s body such as an arm, leg, or wing. 2. A projecting part of a thing, e.g. the branch of a tree.
Student’s Oxford Canadian Dictionary, 2nd Edition (2007)
Blog art.
A suffused, water-coloured clenched raised fist as an international sign of protest. A refusal to lend our limb(s) to the (re)creation of ableism and patriarchy (Ahmed, 2017). The ‘liquified’ characteristic of the image symbolizes the intersectionality of barriers, forms, and struggles for access. The fist is framed by the female gender symbol cut off at the wrist. Ascending from the bottom left corner to the top left corner is the word: ‘FEMINIST’ in uppercase, solid black font. Flushed right in the centre of the image is the phrase ‘A Disabled Archive’ in smaller uppercase and lowercase, solid black font. Slightly flushed left underneath, in squared brackets is the phrase ‘of Intersectional Struggles for Access.’ The word ‘ACCESS’ appears in uppercase font. The word ‘Limns’ is slightly flushed to the right at the bottom of the image in black, loose cursive-style font.
Feminist limns as undoing ableism.
As a person with a physical disability, my experience is limned by the necessity (and the struggle) of using a motorized wheelchair or rollator walker in a world that privileges walking as the optimal form of everyday life navigation. Dominant social, cultural, and structural assumptions of somatic norms do not align with my bodily disposition and comportment. These cascading assumptions result in my being continually confronted by the spectre of ableism – the value of my experience being measured against able-bodied people with ease of access. In a world where the pinnacle of self mastery is independene, my struggle to will my body to comply to the social aesthetics of desired bodily norms have led me to feminism: how we thrive in a world that we are confronted and restricted by, and denied access to (Ahmed, 2017). Following Ahmed’s conceptualization of feminism, developing feminist tendencies begins with recognizing the emotional and physical labour required when we experience social markers of difference – i.e. race, class, gender, disability – “as a restriction of possibility” (p. 7). Feminism begins with bodies (limbs) “not at ease in a world” (p. 7) and provides new ways illuminating (limning) what we must come up against as a form of survival.
An archive of (limned) limbs.
When we gather an archive assembled by limning the experience of our limbs, we not only include documents and texts, but the voices that provide first-hand accounts: the stories of our bodies and limbs in the world. Consider this blog as: my first-hand account limned by my experience as a disabled person with willful and unapologetic limbs in a largely inaccessible world. This blog is a deliberate curration of stories, experiences, texts, and images. A digital archive as the assemblage of memories, thoughts, and reflections that would have otherwise remained scattered, personal, and disorganized becoming legible, intelligible, public, and shared. By limning my lived experience as a disabled woman (my limbs) become part of a community of many that illuminate a cascade of barriers, blockages of access, and ableist tendencies. May my limns (and limbs) as a projecting part of a thing, move us and connect us to rearticulate disability as capacity, as value, as community with a shared refusal to limit the amount of space (Ahmed, 2017) and time we take up conditioned by the multitude of barriers we come up against.
Until next time.
With vulnerability & shared refusal,
Ev XO
Reference:
Ahmed, S. (2017). Living a feminist life. Duke University Press: Durham.
Feminist Limns 