Performing Debility: Joice Heth and Miss Landmine Angola

This chapter uses genealogical performances of disability by women such as Joice Heth to understand the spectacle of Miss Landmine Angola, a beauty pageant organized by Morten Traavik for survivors of landmine detonations. Looking at the website and images as a form of archive, I think through how these women’s will is presented and exploited. Again I argue for the illegibility of these women’s will within this digital archive, instead thinking through possible embodied gestures that can help excavate the social afterlife of subjugated women.