Cultural and artistic activities for women with disabilities have long been emphasized on narratives centered on therapeutic treatment and overcoming barriers. Treatment approaches have the limitation of allowing the disabled people to remain in the position of the object, not the subject of cultural and artistic activity.
Overcoming narratives emphasize the individual efforts and its “unusual” life stories of successful disabled individuals, and this hides the reality of the human rights of persons with disabilities.
Despite the increasing number of cultural and artistic activities of disabled people, there is little discussion concerning the relationship between human rights of persons with disabilities, their cultural activities, and the socio-political meaning of the outcome. If the meaning of cultural rights is restricted to physical accessibility, it is difficult to reveal the position of persons with disabilities who lack resources as creators/producers of culture and arts as well as their labor rights. I analyze, as an activist of the NGO Women with Disabilities Empathy (WDE), the political meaning of the disabled women's arts and culture movement based on the activities of the Disabled Women’s Theatre Group Dancing Waist, WDE. Furthermore, this article explores the social changes necessary to ensure independence and subjectivity in the process of enjoying and producing culture and arts. In particular, disabled women's cultural and artistic activities are deeply connected with interdisciplinary human rights issues such as gender, sexuality, bodily ab/normality, labor rights, deinstitutionalization and the social welfare system.
It is a daily space that supports the right to failure, emphasizing the meaning of the extreme dancing waist as a field of practice against the discrimination defined as abnormal, and suggests the discourse reconstruction of the culture of the disabled. It emphasizes the meaning of the <Dancing Waist> which is a routine space supporting the right to fail and practicing actions against the discrimination toward ableist society. And finally this article suggests a discoursive reconstruction of the disabled people's cultural rights.