Debra Keenahan: The Empathy Clinic: Being Debra, #Belittled

Employing Virtual Reality (VR), Being Debra offers the audience a taste of the embodied experience of being a dwarf in contemporary Australian society (with all its challenges, ugliness and triumphs). Shot from a first-person perspective with a 180 degree camera, the project was initiated by artist Debra Keenahan who lives with achondroplasia dwarfism. The VR experience includes flashbacks to Debra's memories of school, dating, and engaging with authority figures, including doctors, as well as her routine daily encounters in a park. Dwarfism is a readily recognisable physical difference. Throughout history dwarves have experienced the full spectrum from social reverence and assimilation to tokenism, isolation and exclusion. Despite some high-profile exceptions, dwarfism remains, in the words of Peter Dinklage" "one of the last bastions of acceptable prejudice". Such derision manifests in negative treatment with the majority of dwarf people having experienced violence in their lifetime directly related to their dwarfism. Using social media, this work examines day-to-day interactions that challenge the esteem of dwarf people, their strategies for stigma management and self-affirmations. Social media, while an effective avenue for communication and developing on-line communities for support and social activism, also presents as an avenue for anonymous abuse. In the video Debra, a woman with dwarfism, reads Tweets by others with dwarfism as well as their internet trolls. Tweets reporting belittling behaviour are interspersed with accounts of stigma management and self-affirmations.