Cripping the Museum

In November 2010, there was a conference on "Health, Embodiment, and Visual Culture" at McMaster University and an exhibition called "Scrapes: Unruly Embodiments in Video Art" at the McMaster Museum of Art. This article pursues the idea and implications of "scrapes" and "to scrape": as a framework of disturbance and rupture; for knowing differently from a crip perspective; and for cripping museological praxis. Engaging closely with the visual and aural poetics, and critical activist rhetorics of the video works, the argument is that their unruly embodiments generate a mutually informing unsettlement of ableist, heteronormative, and neocolonial relations. The article also reflects critically on the potential to crip the museum when the exhibition's video art archive rubs up against the regulatory mechanisms and the neoliberal model of diversity in the un-cripped university.