Face Equality in the Arts
It’s Face Equality Week and the theme is My Face is a Masterpiece.
As an artist and arts worker with a facial difference, I want to talk about face equality in the arts. The arts is broad – including performance art, visual art, music, writing, circus, dance and even media like film, TV, radio, podcasts and vodcasts and news reporting.
Facial difference (and disability) is often appropriated, mocked and mimicked in the arts. Characters with facial differences are played by people without facial differences. Facial difference is often a tragic or scary storyline, designed to garner pity or fear from the audience. These tropes are harmful as they reinforce negative stereotypes about people with facial differences – that we are to be feared, ridiculed, pitied, lead tragic lives and are less than; and suggests our appearance can be emulated with makeup, a mask or a costume. Unlike makeup, mask or a costume, our facial differences cannot be taken off at the end of a performances, and we endure daily exclusion, questioning, ridicule and discrimination – something that people without facial differences may not endure because of their appearance. And artists with facial differences miss out on opportunities while people without facial differences co-opt out stories.
Here are some considerations to make when thinking about facial differences and the arts, especially if you do not have a facial difference.
Do you really need to wear a costume or makeup that depicts disfigurement or facial difference in your art?
Is the makeup, costume or mask you’re wearing designed to scare or shock or disgust people?
Are you using a character with facial difference to represent a weakness?
Have you got authentic casting – that is a person with a facial difference playing a person with a facial difference (like Adam Pearson has been cast as Elephant Man)?
Is there a storyline where someone who looks different is laughed at or makes people gasp?
Is facial difference a negative trope in your storyline?
Is the person with the facial difference having to educate, or can their facial difference be incidental?
Are you including a content warning about someone’s facial difference, or are you
including a content warning about ableism related to the facial difference?
If you are creating art that includes a narrative about facial difference, get lived experience consultants and pay them.
More information:
Image: Carly, a woman with a red face and short dark curly hair, wearing a colourful jelly print dress and an ice cream brooch pinned to it. Black text on a white background in the top right reads “Face Equality in the Arts @CarlyFindlay”
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