Gendered Representations of Disability

Flex, Sophie Hoyle, 2022

In association with the AHRC funded Gendered re-presentations of disability research project led by Emma Pullen at Loughborough University, I commissioned two new artworks from artists Sophie Hoyle and Christopher Samuel, both of whom made new work in response to the data generated by the research project and its wider thematic context.  

Hoyle and Samuel's practices explore and call into being politicized modes of disabled subjectivity as they intersect with processes of racialization, class, queerness and gender. Their commissioned works were presented at a small exhibition, Para-Representations, held at Loughborough’s London campus in September 2022.  

Produced in collaboration with a commercial photographer, Christopher Samuel’s series of photographs explore the conventions which typically govern the ways in which para-athletes represent themselves on social media, playing with ideas of revealing and concealing.

Sophie Hoyle’s film, Flex (2022) interweaves intimate conversations with members of the artist’s community, building a picture of the complicated relationship a group of queer, trans, disabled and chronically ill people have with sporting activity. Over forty minutes these conversations reveal a constant process of negotiating with the circumscribed gender identities associated with many sports, the politics of competition and nationalism, threats of violence and the promises of safer spaces.

Following the exhibition, Hoyle and Samuel are re-presenting their work in new contexts; Hoyle’s film Flex (2022) will be hosted on the Radar website for a three-week period (16 January – 5 February 2023), while one of Samuel’s large-scale photographs, You're Not as Tall as You Look on Instagram" (1 of 5), (2022) will be featured as a poster in a Loughborough University campus bus shelter (16 – 29 January 2023).