“A Parade of Horribles” assigns the visual representations of “subhuman” or “monster” to bodies imperiled with internal dysfunction as a critical examination of what it means to be human in a world that isn’t always humane and where we are defined as much by what we are as what we are not. 
This work is inspired by my personal eight year experience overcoming a debilitative disease called Avascular Necrosis, and draws on the scholarship of cultural, philosophical, and political posthumanism, visual culture, and disability studies. 
For over 500 years, Humanism has posited a healthy, white “man” as the measure of all things at the center of the universe, implicitly regarding women, homosexuals, people of color, people with differently formed bodies and disabilities as variants outside of the classification of human, thus enabling social and political establishments, upper classes, and professionals to confine and deny the rights of ‘others’ by categorizing individuals as inhuman, or subhuman because they looked or behaved differently. 
Posthumanism says Humanism has reached its end and that a new era has emerged which encourages empathy and coexistence among all living things, a respect of the environment and the technologies we create. 
Thus a paradox emerges where my figures also represent the internal dysfunction of the classical standardized human, falling in behind the new leader of the procession of life who represents change and holds the potential for what we can become.