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Initially, medical models tended to regard disability as an individual problem. By linking disability to therapy or treatment, they only reinforced the idea of the perfect or normal body. Disability studies began to propose more radical concepts, shifting the emphasis away from the medical model to a more social construction of disability. Following the social-model approach, the normalization practices produced by the medical model go a long way towards creating social representations based on such dichotomous concepts as able/disabled. Thus, the authority of the medical model means that the disabled subject is commonly seen as someone in need of help and pity, while our medicalized society responds by providing special treatments increasingly based on the promise of normalization. The media also use images that reproduce the medical model, conveying a message of compassion to the viewer. But more recently, the media have also begun to propose a different form of representation, perhaps the most popular and famous being that of athlete Oscar Pistorius. The prosthetic body transforms the image of the disabled subject into a “supercrip”. It is in this fusion between biology and technology that the science-fiction vision of the cyborg re-emerges. The imperfect body has prompted a third way of looking at disability, which we might define as “fashioncrip”. Here, the prosthesis has been created as part of the overall design, now becoming a work of art, not simply an artificial device to replace a body part. To underline this new trend, I analyse the video clip “Prototype” by Viktoria Modesta, the first “bionic pop artist”. In this video, pop culture meets the physical reality of amputation as a “poetic” concept, rather than a medical procedure, in a transition from what we might define as prosthetic to pro(ae)sthetic, in which the body’s fragility is transformed into beauty.
