Guggenheim Fellow Jessica Blinkhorn takes sex (and art) seriously

Forty-five-year-old performance artist Jessica Elaine Blinkhorn looks toward the collection of makeup accessories on the table in front of her and says wryly, “I just hope I can live 10 more years to keep making art.”

This isn’t idle musing. Blinkhorn is disabled and uses an electric wheelchair. She gets dressed with the help of her caregiver and does her makeup, getting ready to record TikTok videos, part of the nonstop self-branding that all artists have to do nowadays. But unlike most other artists, Blinkhorn was born with spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), a rare genetic condition in which all of the muscles deteriorate due to a damaged protein. A symptom of this is severe scoliosis of the spinal cord. As children, people diagnosed with SMA may have trouble crawling, walking or holding their heads up. As the condition progresses with time, SMA may affect the ability to breathe or swallow.

Also unlike most other artists, Blinkhorn was recently awarded a Guggenheim fellowship. The Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awards around 175 fellowships per year on a competitive basis in a variety of arts and humanities fields. Amounts vary, but typical awards carry a cash stipend between $30,000 and $45,000. The award puts Blinkhorn at a career peak and, she says, more confident in herself creatively than ever before.

Credit: Andrew Lyman

Credit: Andrew Lyman

That confidence manifests itself in how she presents herself to the world. Blinkhorn has fashioned herself into a vampy sex kitten, complete with Daisy Duke shorts, rhinestone high-heel boots, long bejeweled nails, chunky blond highlights, eyelashes that would make Tammy Faye Bakker weep, gold hoop earrings and a barely there top that reveals her cleavage. She is hard to miss when she prowls the Beltline’s Eastside Trail in similar get-ups.

Blinkhorn, who teaches drawing and painting at Georgia State University and Callanwolde Fine Arts Center, has made a career of crossing her interdisciplinary art making with advocacy for disabled people, including LGBTQ disabled people. In “REVERENCE: We 3″ (2019), for example, Blinkhorn sat in public spaces that were not wheelchair accessible for three hours each, inviting community members to treat her as an object of reverence with flowers laid before her. The performance, which traveled the country, was meant to draw attention to the possibilities unrealized in inaccessible places.

Both of Blinkhorn’s siblings, Erica and Gerald “JB” Blinkhorn, were also born with SMA. Erica lived to age 35, and JB lived until age 27 — both surviving much longer than the average person living with SMA. This would have made Jessica at 45 an outlier until the development of modern treatments.

“Living the life of a disabled person is quite difficult. I have seen friends and even my own siblings leave this world too soon,” says Blinkhorn. “I try very hard not to compare my timeline to those who I have known with the same condition. You anticipate the process and just hope that it’s painless for you. And on days when I’m tired and I feel like it’s just going to be a bad day and I worry, I remember my Granny Vivian saying, ‘You know, Jessie, the world ends for somebody every day.’”

If daily life is more complicated as a disabled person, dating and sex are no exception. Blinkhorn laments not only having to navigate relationships themselves but also the misunderstandings and bigotry of non-disabled people looking on. She recalls how a long-term friend who had at points in the past been a romantic partner, was always assumed to be her brother or her son, so unthinkable was the idea to most people of a disabled person having a romantic and sexual life. And if the nature of the relationship was known, her partner was sometimes even berated for being with her. “They would say to him, ‘How dare you take advantage of that girl,’” she says. “But he was my partner.”

Dating took an even darker turn in 2022 for Blinkhorn in the fraught world of dating apps. A consensual sexual encounter that came from an app connection quickly escalated into a sexual assault on Blinkhorn, who was unable to stop the other person’s actions. Relying only on her voice, she was not able to physically throw her assailant off, punch him or defend herself in any other way. Processing this moment of vulnerability and fear made Blinkhorn resolve to center the role of sex in the lives of disabled people in her work.

The specific project for which she received the Guggenheim Fellowship — Spankbox.ATL.inc — grew out of this turn, which is a departure from previous work. Spankbox encompasses photography, design, performance, activism and social practice. The work is meant to arouse a prurient interest in viewers, too.

Credit: Andrew Lyman

Credit: Andrew Lyman

Blinkhorn describes the project as “a photographic installation that depicts individuals with physical disabilities in hypersexualized poses and situations. Spankbox puts the power back in the hands of those with physical disabilities by granting the audience permission to look, fantasize and question disability and sexuality in a safe environment.”

The name of the project itself is risqué and alludes to the notion of a “Spankbank,” which Urban Dictionary describes as “A mental collection of visual images one stores in one’s mind to remember later for purposes of ‘self pleasure.’ See: masturbation.” With Spankbox, Blinkhorn and her creative collaborators create sexy, 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s-inspired sexualized imagery that centers disabled bodies as if they were on the cover of Penthouse or Hustler magazines.

The imagery and language in the Spankbox series is purposefully sexually aggressive. It includes disabled bodies in sexy poses — viewers who like big bottoms, guys in jockstraps having sex, or pendulous breasts might just get turned on.

After the shock of the image, the viewer’s eyes are drawn to the tagline on the poster. One says: “Do you think I [have sex] in my wheelchair?” and another says: “Does social stigma stop you from pursuing someone with a noticeable disability?” The models in the series come from around the country and have included Atlanta-based artist Megan Mosholder. Some have visible disabilities, while some have invisible disabilities. Some are big, and others are remarkably skinny. One has an ostomy bag. All in all, these images reframe disabled people as people who are sexual, live full lives and people who might want to show their bodies off to the world.

Blinkhorn sees herself as a catalyst for this new sexual revolution for disabled people. Because someone uses a wheelchair, the work says, doesn’t mean they can’t be sexy or they can’t flirt with strangers. Perhaps, more importantly, Blinkhorn aims to be titillating with this series. She hopes that non-disabled people might be attracted to the bodies they see in the posters. While this butts up against questions of fetishism, Blinkhorn says she is willing to use her own body to in fact de-escalate fetishism and increase visibility of disability and sex. Blinkhorn has been praised for this series by disability advocates for helping normalize the idea of a full life for disabled people, one that includes sex and eroticism.

Blinkhorn, however, resists being easily categorized as a do-gooder. By her own admission, she hates it when people call her a hero or an angel. Angels aren’t usually depicted as talking like a sailor on shore leave. She has described her own work as “abrasively insightful,” a phrase which others have taken up, and she is not afraid to bring a bit of aggression to how she relates to those around her. She has been a watchdog regarding businesses not in compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) regulations.

Although she has aggravated several people over the years, she says it is worth it when she sees another disabled person or an elderly person with limited mobility better access the spaces she had to sue in order to bring them up to ADA code.

In 2015, she created a protest called Roll Hard to bring attention to problems with MARTA Mobility (the special transportation program for people with disabilities who have trouble accessing conventional metro Atlanta trains and buses). Blinkhorn had grown tired of MARTA Mobility forgetting to pick her up and MARTA buses not equipped to safely transport her. To protest, she endured rain, uneven terrain, dangerous surroundings and more to show the struggles people in wheelchairs face with public transit in the city. She also filed almost a dozen grievances. Eventually, MARTA addressed these concerns and even upgraded some of the transportation vehicles.

Credit: Andrew Lyman

Credit: Andrew Lyman

Traveling while disabled is one of the themes that comes up in Blinkhorn’s story over and over again. One of the biggest challenges in her expanding career is traveling to new artist opportunities such as festivals and residencies. Like a rock star, Blinkhorn must travel with an entourage of caregivers and equipment. She needs at least two caregivers to travel with her (the work hours would be impossible for them without each having a break), which essentially triples the cost of doing anything. Notably, caregivers are not volunteer friends and family members sticking around for the travel and fun. They are trained professionals doing a job who must be paid for their hourly work. Blinkhorn has to pay for this herself — they aren’t provided for free by the government, another common misconception.

“Believe it or not, my disability is not the most disabling part of my life,” she says. “A system that claims to care and offer assistance while practicing smoke screen tactics to further our exclusion is more disabling than my disability.”

The United States has public assistance programs for people with disabilities to help offset what they must pay for caregivers, wheelchairs, adapting their home environment to safely get around and so forth. Many people with a disability would not be able to afford to pay for caregivers without government assistance.

“We can work, but we can’t make too much money,” Blinkhorn notes. “Earning over our income cap puts us at risk for losing our medical benefits. which far exceed what most jobs accessible to us will provide.”

Currently, people with a disability can make no more than $1,550 ($2,590 if they are blind) per month as of 2024 or their Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) benefits will stop. If Blinkhorn were to make more than $18,600 a year, her disability would no longer be recognized by the federal government in such a way that she could receive the assistance she needs to pay for her necessary living expenses.

Disability advocates call this dynamic the “poverty trap,” and it has been a problem for decades, which has led to people with disabilities being forced into poverty because they have no other option to survive. Since the income threshold is so low — well below the average cost of living for a non-disabled person — many people with disabilities end up housebound because they cannot afford to work or leave their home.

For Blinkhorn, the disability poverty trap creates a Catch-22 as she pursues grants to fund her work. Technically, she cannot be the recipient of her Guggenheim grant or she would lose all the federal assistance she relies on to pay for her caregivers and other expenses.

“Having something means I could lose everything,” she says. This is why “Spankbox.ATL.inc” is an independent business separate from Blinkhorn. All the money she receives goes back into her art.

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Blinkhorn continues to navigate her disability in a delicate balance with making art. Spinal muscular atrophy is a progressive disease, meaning Blinkhorn’s abilities, strengths and weaknesses will change over her lifetime.

Despite being trained primarily in drawing and illustration, she has had to move away from the medium she loved so much throughout her schooling. The act of drawing, and the commercial limitations of the medium, made it impractical for her to pursue this work on a large scale because of the nature of SMA.

Blinkhorn’s physical ability to hold a pencil and draw has deteriorated over the years. Now the process of drawing has become too painful for her to do day in and day out. Also, the amount of money she could earn from the small, photorealistic drawings that were her strength was never enough to warrant the labor and physical pain she had to go through to create them. These days she only makes drawings for people she loves.

Credit: Andrew Lyman

Credit: Andrew Lyman

“The disease has almost taken my hands completely,” says Blinkhorn. “Drawing is a painful reminder of what my disability has taken from me. Curation, installation, performance and public speaking have given me the chance to create spaces for other marginalized individuals.”

For now, Blinkhorn hopes to have as many more days, and years, as possible to make new work. She’s creating new work, dating and discovering who she wants to be. Currently, she is considering getting cosmetic lip injections so she can pucker up like Jennifer Coolidge.

“I want to look like a disabled blow up sex doll,” she says. “The partnering of disability and sexuality seemingly makes able-bodied individuals very uncomfortable. But I’m under the idea that being uncomfortable shows you just how strong you can be. And if you’re going to stare at me, you’re going to stare at me with purpose and that purpose will cause change.”

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Matthew Terrell is an assistant professor of media and entertainment in the School of Communications at Kennesaw State University.

Credit: ArtsATL

Credit: ArtsATL

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