Embodiment and the Disabled (Extraordinary) Body: Carol Chase Bjerke’s Hidden Agenda and the External Internality of Ostomies

Abstract

This essay uses critical phenomenology to examine Carol Chase Bjerke’s ostomy art in Hidden Agenda. With an ostomy, the intestine erupts past the skin barrier and interrupts everyday life. Bjerke’s ostomy-centred installation pieces question the boundaries between subject and object, inside and outside, ability and disability, "I can" and "I cannot," clean and unclean. Bjerke molds "misfortune cookies," stoma wallpaper and rose-colored glasses (reading glasses with stoma-shaped lenses) to reframe lived ostomy experience, forcing the viewer to visualize a physical manifestation of the inherent in-betweenness of disability and externalize the hiddenness of the ostomy. Drawing on the personal phenomenological perspectives of Bjerke’s artistic practice, part of her "Art and Healing" trilogy that documents her own response to living with an ostomy after treatment for colorectal cancer, and my own lived experience, I argue that the ostomy as a liminal state of disability not only resists ableist binaries;      it also marks a productive site through which to view disability itself as the lived experience of a critical phenomenology. The simultaneity of inside and outside defies precise definition, complicating and overturning the distinction between "fitting" and "misfitting." Playfully reshaping this liminality, this essay also meditates on the phenomenological strangeness of touching my own ostomy for the first time, drawing on the curious shifting between self and other to imagine a more complex intertwined embodiment.