Ronald Parisi

Sensuality & Disability Essay
from the ‘Appropriated Imagery: Master Status Suite’
color photograph

Generally, in this essay I hope to visually challenge the able-bodied populations’ negative precepts of disability. In this particular Suite, I set my models (all with disabling conditions) in familiar poses, inspired by those seen in the visual media. Therein they present the powerful dichotomy of being in symbolic, visual circumstances that they are not normally associated with. The Master Status Suite further asks the basic question: Do you see the person or the disability as the dominant factor in judging the person’s humanity and hierarchy in the social order?

It is my intention that the photograph at least causes the able-bodied to begin to examine their pejorative, discriminatory and prejudicial attitudes about disability, and cause them to realize that a disability is but one characteristic of a person, that a person with a disabling condition is not that condition but can also be an attractive, sexual, capable human being, albeit different.

© Ronald Parisi