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The Fluid Connections and Uncertain Spaces of Women with Disabilities: Making Links Across and Beyond the Global South
Abstract
This chapter maps aspects of the gendered experiences of living with and alongside disability in the global South and highlight openings in related feminist analysis. There are two main foci: 1. Challenging universalized views of disability by questioning how women with disabilities are positioned, especially in the global South, and how their positionality, subjectivity, and intersectionality are understood in light of shifting global forces. 2. Addressing the feminist critique of disability, as it incorporates new gender theory and a broadened geopolitics of globalization via feminist postcolonial and postconventional thinking(Shildrick and Price 2005; Parekh 2007; Meekosha 2011). These theories have opened avenues for a provisional politics of embodied interdependency and transformative connections which lead to hopes of a geopolitically aware ethics of flourishing (Campbell 2011; Puar 2012a; Shildrick and Price 2005).
... With lower rates of school attendance and heightened rates of bullying and violence (Women Enabled, n.d.), girls with disabilities face specific challenges to accessing education due to the intersections of gender, poverty, and disability. This includes a lack of accessible toilets, parental fears that they will be sexually abused by people in positions of power (teachers, assistants, bus drivers), and a feeling that girl's education is less valuable which is further compounded by negative perceptions of disability (Price & Goyal, 2016). Women with disabilities are excluded from work and economic activities, they face continued stigma if they want to marry or have children (Price & Goyal, 2016), and experience multiple barriers to accessing justice (Dowse et al., 2016;Bernasky, 2022;United Nations Population Fund, 2018). ...
... This includes a lack of accessible toilets, parental fears that they will be sexually abused by people in positions of power (teachers, assistants, bus drivers), and a feeling that girl's education is less valuable which is further compounded by negative perceptions of disability (Price & Goyal, 2016). Women with disabilities are excluded from work and economic activities, they face continued stigma if they want to marry or have children (Price & Goyal, 2016), and experience multiple barriers to accessing justice (Dowse et al., 2016;Bernasky, 2022;United Nations Population Fund, 2018). ...
This chapter examines how Participatory Visual Methodologies can be used to
create more inclusive and accessible spaces with disabled people in the Global
South. Drawing on a 4-year research project, funded by the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada (2016–2020) with girls and women with
disabilities in Vietnam, we argue that a decolonial Participatory Visual Methodology (PVM) approach is critical for centering the perspectives of girls and
women with disabilities in spaces where they may have previously been
excluded. This work is important for disability rights because it creates a more
transformative approach to social justice in communities in the global South.
... Caste and class background can affect the situation of Indian women more than Norwegian women. In the case of disabled women, the contrast is even more consequential (Addlakha 2008;Agnihotri and Patel 2007;Price and Goyal 2016;Kayama, Johnstone, and limaye 2021). These differing contexts challenged me to recognise my position as a white, middle-class female researcher from Norway supported by a strong welfare state. ...
By taking an autoethnographic approach I intend to explore my epistemological and ontological experiences as a deaf Norwegian PhD candidate on a data collection journey in an Indian context. The aim of this article is to delve into challenges in a research process with a complex and multilinguistic environment, with barriers occurring, and how they could be understood and met. I identify and discuss barriers and possibilities in my research journey, describe how I faced challenges with gaining access to the field, and with recruitment issues, and share my process of finding solutions regarding communication. The autoethnographic analysis reveals a complex research situation with dynamic relationships and displays intersectionality in action. This analysis illuminates how knowledge production is linked to epistemological and ontological concerns. The reflexivity of the researcher is crucial, but the power of definition is also of interest and points to my shifting positionality as a deaf researcher.
... Place-specific (Haang'andu, 2020;Hamel & Falola, 2021) and new materialist (Feely, 2016) approaches to disability studies have emerged, challenging the universal application of minority-world disability paradigms (though calls for this are not new within majority-world social movements). Price and Goyal (2016) highlight the "pressure to generalize, universalize, and exclude" (p. 304) in disability studies. ...
Women with disabilities are among the most marginalised members of the Federation of Disability Organizations in Malawi (FEDOMA), facing particular challenges related to sexual and gender‐based violence and family/home life; women with disabilities are both abused because of their embodied womanhood and denied many socially‐valued “traditional women’s roles.” However, women within Malawi’s disability rights movement transgress the boundaries of these social restraints. In this article, I share stories of women disability activists, drawn from an interview and participant observation‐based project, co‐designed with FEDOMA to explore the experiences of grassroots activists. In telling their stories, the women of FEDOMA detailed processes of empowerment and change, combatting their own and others’ experiences of violence, abuse, and exclusion. I discuss the ways in which women activists embodied roles that altered their communities and built activist networks, supporting one another in expressing agency, strength, and solidarity. Their work highlights a politics of care that emphasises the “traditional” and the “modern,” incorporating individualised human rights discourse into an ethics of community caring and expanding this collective inclusion to the oppressed and marginalised. In focusing on the experiences of Malawi’s women disability activists, we gain a more complex understanding of mechanisms of marginalisation, resistance, and empowerment.
... In addressing the challenge of 59 disability stigma, the chapter considers matters associated with disclosure (see also 60 chapter ▶ "Sexual Orientation and Workplace Bullying" by Hoel, Lewis,& 61 Einarsdóttir, this volume) and the steps employers and co-workers need to take to 62 address this. We then turn to explore the limited empirical evidence for disability and (Mitra & Sambamoorthi, 2006) and in the 180 gendered experiences of disabled women in the global south (Price & Goyal, 2016). 220 with a similar percentage having difficulties concentrating and remembering. ...
This chapter considers how and why people with disabilities, impairments and chronic ill health report being subjected to bullying at work. Against a global environment that is reporting increases in working age, elongated access to workplace pensions as well as a growth in insecure work, workplaces of the future are increasingly likely to encompass increasing numbers of workers who are more likely to have some form of impairment or chronic ill health. Aside from gender and race, workplace bullying researchers have generally been slow to embrace diverse workplace populations with very little data on the experiences of people classified as holding impairments or chronic ill health. These populaces require careful research designs sensitive to their situations and mindful of how bullying at work can manifest in their lives. This chapter sets out some of the challenges facing researchers operating in a political–social landscape that currently locates the disabled and chronically sick as a cost to be managed. In maintaining the tradition of trying to make workplaces fairer and more dignified in their treatment of workers, the chapter sets out some of the challenges of seeing disabled people as ordinary human diversities rather than pathologies.
... In this regard, disabled women are impacted in a variety of ways. For example, when "the act of 'choosing' is always the man's right" (Philips, 2003, p. 22), negative beliefs and stereotypes surrounding disability may lead potential suitors and their families to falsely view a WWD as unable to bear healthy children or perform the extensive household duties of a wife (Price & Goyal, 2016). ...
The majority of people with disability (PWD) live in the global South. Over the last four decades, community-based rehabilitation (CBR) programs have dominated the way development programs operate and intercede in the lives of PWD, especially in low- and middle-income countries. This research uses participant observation and in-depth interviews to gather women’s experiences of disablement and CBR in Sri Lanka. Major findings detail ways CBR programs fail to address larger social inequities, specifically centered around ableism and sexism, and how these barriers are embedded in societies. Thus, these programs continue to target rehabilitation efforts at the level of the individual, without changing shared social circumstances of discrimination. Failure to respond to social inequalities continuing to marginalize groups of individuals is a global issue, permeating nations regardless of their level of resources. CBR programs are intended to be more empowering than segregated forms of rehabilitation, yet few studies incorporate the perspectives of PWDs. Centering experiences of women with disability (WWD) in CBR programs, this dissertation reveals glaring deficits in the CBR framework and argues perspectives of WWD are valid and important sources of knowledge needed to inform research and practice. Three main themes connect inadequate childhood education and current employment experiences, a myriad of social factors shaping well-being, and an increase in mobility through social movements. Results illuminate the need to refocus international development and intervention efforts away from individual deficit-based models toward systematic societal-level interventions informed and guided by the experiences of people the programs aim to serve.
... Indian evidence also showed that over half of households with disabled men and a third of households with disabled women were in a downwards economic spiral caused by lack of earnings from those with a disability (Mitra and Sambamoorthi, 2006b). It is also important to recognise the intersectionality of gender and disability with significant differences in employment rates for disabled men and women in India (Mitra and Sambamoorthi, 2006) and in the gendered experiences of disabled women in the global south (Price and Goyal, 2016). ...
This chapter considers how and why people with disabilities, impairments and chronic ill health report being subjected to bullying at work. Against a global environment that is reporting increases in working age, elongated access to workplace pensions as well as a growth in insecure work, workplaces of the future are increasingly likely to encompass increasing numbers of workers who are more likely to have some form of impairment or chronic ill health. Aside from gender and race, workplace bullying researchers have generally been slow to embrace diverse workplace populations with very little data on the experiences of people classified as holding impairments or chronic ill health. These populaces require careful research designs sensitive to their situations and mindful of how bullying at work can manifest in their lives. This chapter sets out some of the challenges facing researchers operating in a political–social landscape that currently locates the disabled and chronically sick as a cost to be managed. In maintaining the tradition of trying to make workplaces fairer and more dignified in their treatment of workers, the chapter sets out some of the challenges of seeing disabled people as ordinary human diversities rather than pathologies.
George Floyd's death on May 25th 2020 marked a watershed in reactions to anti-Black racism in the United States and elsewhere. Intense demonstrations around the world followed. Within literary studies, the demonstrations accelerated the scrutiny of the literary curriculum, the need to diversify the curriculum, and the need to incorporate more Black writers. Decolonizing the English Literary Curriculum is a major collection that aims to address these issues from a global perspective. An international team of leading scholars illustrate the necessity and advantages of reform from specific decolonial perspectives, with evidence-based arguments from classroom contexts, as well as establishing new critical agendas. The significance of Decolonizing the English Literary Curriculum lies in the complete overhaul it proposes for the study of English literature. It reconnects English studies, the humanities, and the modern, international university to issues of racial and social justice. This book is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Alors que les travaux sur le sujet se font de plus en plus nombreux en études féministes du handicap anglo-saxonnes, ou Feminist Disability Studies , l’objectif de cet article est d’outiller les études féministes francophones en proposant une cartographie du développement du champ, axée sur ses grands courants et leurs propositions théoriques et conceptuelles majeures. La première partie de l’article rappelle l’essentiel des modèles médical et social du handicap. La seconde se centre sur les contributions des approches féministes matérialistes du handicap et la troisième sur celles des perspectives féministes poststructuralistes et postmodernes. La quatrième partie expose trois développements récents en Feminist Disability Studies illustrant l’influence des pensées crip et queer , la complexification des analyses intersectionnelles du handicap et l’émergence de perspectives du Sud.
Various studies have shown that since the late 20th century, Cuban migration follows global patterns of feminisation. As more Cuban women migrate during their reproductive years, fertility rates have decreased in the island, resulting in the shrinking of the youth population relative to older adults. Both the lack and unequal distribution of care services for older adults and the shrinking welfare services suggest an impending crisis; and the failure of social policy to anticipate these problems and plan accordingly further aggravates it. The result is an uneven landscape, particularly within a general context of social stratification, with some sectors and geographical areas facing greater hardships than others. In this Chapter we delve onto these issues to analyse the relationship between international migration patterns and both, population ageing and the crisis of elderly care in Cuba.
The forthcoming book Dis/ability Studies: Theorising Disablism and Ableism argues that we are living in an historical epoch which might be described as neoliberal-ableism, in which we are all subjected to slow death, increased precarity and growing debility. In this paper we apply this analysis to a consideration of austerity with further reference to disability studies and politics.
What would it mean to look beyond citizenship — at least in its neoliberal form — towards new concepts of belonging that might deal differently with issues of power, inequality and difference that open up rather than restrict personal imagination and socio-cultural imaginaries? My starting point is that citizenship as we currently know it, and perhaps particularly in the contemporary globalised polity, fails to satisfy the very human desire to flourish (which I understand as the ontological condition of well-Being, rather than well-being),1 not simply on a personal level but as part of a wider sense of belonging. At the very simplest level, citizenship — as with any category — relies on a series of exclusions of those who do not or cannot fit, and amongst such groupings, the drive for citizenship is often unabated. I want to address the issues concerning one such excluded group — people with disabilities — not to suggest that the pragmatic response should be to uncritically endorse any claims on the polity and leave it at that, but to propose that the very complexity of answering to the differences that underlie the sociopolitical drive in the first place might paradoxically indicate a new way forward. My reflections here are somewhat tentative, but emerge from a critique of the conventional ground of mainstream disability politics (Shildrick 2009) as it operates to maximise the status and life experiences of disabled people in the West.
This article explores various analytical issues involved in conceptualizing the interrelationships of gender, class, race and ethnicity and other social divisions. It compares the debate on these issues that took place in Britain in the 1980s and around the 2001 UN World Conference Against Racism. It examines issues such as the relative helpfulness of additive or mutually constitutive models of intersectional social divisions; the different analytical levels at which social divisions need to be studied, their ontological base and their relations to each other. The final section of the article attempts critically to assess a specific intersectional methodological approach for engaging in aid and human rights work in the South.
This essay aims to amplify feminist theory by articulating and fostering
feminist disability theory. It names feminist disability studies as
an
academic field of inquiry, describes work that is already underway,
calls for needed study and sets an agenda for future work in feminist
disability studies. Feminist disability theory augments the terms and
confronts the limits of the ways we understand human diversity, the
materiality of the body, multiculturalism, and the social formations
that interpret bodily differences. The essay asserts that integrating
disability as a category of analysis and a system of representation
deepens, expands, and challenges feminist theory. To elaborate on these
premises, the essay discusses four fundamental and interpenetrating
domains of feminist theory: representation, the body, identity, and
activism, suggesting some critical inquiries that considering disability
can generate within these theoretical arenas.
This article seeks to examine the politics of human rights and disability in light of the recent United Nations Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities (UNCRPD), which has been central to the struggle for recognition of disabled people. Northern discourses of disability rights have strongly influenced the UNCRPD. We argue that many of the everyday experiences of disabled people in the global South lie outside the reach of human rights instruments. So we ask what, if anything, can these instruments contribute to the struggle for disability justice in the South? While Northern discourses promote an examination of disabled bodies in social dynamics, we argue that the politics of impairment in the global South must understand social dynamics in bodies.
This paper argues that the dominance of the global North in the universalising and totalising tendencies of writings about disability has resulted in the marginalisation of these experiences in the global South. This constitutes an intellectual crisis for disability studies in the periphery. The experience of colonisation and colonialism in the global South was both disabling and devastating for the inhabitants. The production of impaired peoples continues as a result of a multiplicity of phenomena including: war and civil strife, nuclear testing, the growth of the arms trade, the export of pollution to ‘pollution havens’ and the emergence of sweatshops. Yet the agendas of disability pride and celebration in the metropole may appear to stand in stark contrast to the need to prevent mass impairments in the global South. The paper concludes by attempting to articulate a southern theory of disability that challenges some of the implicit values and concepts of contemporary disability studies and includes analyses of the lasting disabling impact of colonialism.
Intellectual disability is one of the least researched areas in social science inquiry. This paper traces the complex interplay between the concepts of intellectual disability, gender and personhood. It outlines the socio-historical and cross-cultural variability of intellectual disability, and its connections with class, urbanisation and modernisa- tion. Based on ethnographic material on the disabled in Delhi and the neighbouring state of Haryana, it presents case studies of two NGOs working with the intellectually disabled, namely, Arpan, a school for the mentally retarded in Rohtak, Haryana, and Action for Autism in New Delhi. It engages specifically with the notion of masculinity and the manner in which intellectually disabled male adults are feminised and in- fantilised. An attempt is made to understand how disabled individuals and their families seek social spaces for themselves and negotiate the social compulsions for ‘normalcy’ and competent adulthood.
Disability is a representational system and its denotation is a result of how communities make sense of and mark corporeal differences. In this paper I argue that the UN norm standard setting, a form of geodisability knowledge, determines the kinds of bodies known as disabled and acts as a technology of disability governmentality. The institutional strategic gaze, sited in the UN, examines, normalises and conditions nation-states. Without consensual international disability norms it would not be possible to disclose and make visible the dynamics of disability at a country level and for the World Health Organisation (WHO) to map disability globally. An alternate reading of international norms is to figure the functioning of geodisability knowledge to naturalise it through codifying hegemonic ways of seeing, citing and situating disability and thus colonise different cultural approaches to disability. A discussion of geodisability knowledge production is pursued within the context of a Sri Lankan case study.
Deleuze and Guattari discuss the rhizome as being "absolutely different from roots and radicles" 6. The rhizome is explained via principles. 1 and 2: connection and heterogeneity.: "any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be". Principle 3: "Principle of multiplicity" "There are no points or positions in a rhizome, such as those found in a structure, tree, or root. There are only lines". Principle 4: "Principle of asignifying rupture" "There is a rupture in the rhizome whenever segmentary lines explode into a line of flight, but the line of flight is part of the rhizome." Principles 5 and 6: Principle of cartography and decalcomania: Where traditional thought is 'tracing', a rhizome is a map. Tracing involves laying onto reality the pattern of structure, itself a construct. "The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious". They take the term plateau from Gregory Bateson, it refers to a sustained intensity. "We call a 'plateau' any multiplicity connected to other multiplicities by superficial underground stems in such a way as to form or extend a rhizome".
"Write with slogans: Make rhizomes, not roots, never plant!"
Disability and Difference in Global Contexts explores the possibilities and limitations re-theorizing disability using historical materialism in the interdisciplinary contexts of social theory, cultural studies, social and education policy, feminist ethics, and theories of citizenship.
Queer theory offers itself as radical epistemology to uncover pervasive forms of power, not only around sexuality but also around ‘race’ and transgender. Queer of colour theorists and some trans theorists have remained sceptical about these grand claims, and pointed out the notorious silence about racism and transphobia in the mainstream of queer theorising ((charles), 1993; Cohen, 2001; Haritaworn, 2007). Their critique echoes an older tradition of theorising multiple relations of oppression that has been particularly advocated by lesbians of colour like Audre Lorde (1984), Gloria Anzaldúa (1987) and Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott and Barbara Smith (1982, 1983). While the anti-racist feminisms of the 1980s have produced their own silences, especially around transgender and dissident sexualities, we will here argue that their call to positionality is vital in developing a queer theory and research practice that addresses the silences around raciality. This chapter is an attempt to find a language for our dissatisfaction with the silencing of the knowledge productions and political activisms of trans people of colour, queers of colour, women of colour and migrant women in the UK and Germany; at the same time it is about exploring the possibilities and limits of the concept of ‘intersectionality’. In nearly two decades of a critical debate about how multiple oppressions around gender, ‘race’ and class interlock, ‘intersectionality’ emerged as a concept which promises a comprehensive theorising of various power relations.
'Boserup's contribution to our thinking on women's role in development cannot be underestimated. Her keen observations, her use of empirical data and her commitment to greater gender equality are still an inspiration to students, researchers and activists who are interested in a better and more equal world.' From the new Introduction by Nazneen Kanji, Su Fei Tan and Camilla Toulmin 'Women's Role in Economic Development has become a key reference book for anyone - student, scholar, or practitioner - interested in gender and development analyses. This book is important not only because it provided the intellectual underpinning of the Women in Development (WID) analysis, but also because of the lasting influence it had on the development of theoretical, conceptual, and policy thinking in the fields of women, gender, and development. The re-editing of Women's Role in Economic Development, with its new introduction, ensures students, academics, and practitioners continued access to an essential reference for those interested in the women and development literature.' Gender and Development This classic text by Ester Boserup was the first investigation ever undertaken into what happens to women in the process of economic and social growth throughout the developing world, thereby serving as an international benchmark. In the context of the ongoing struggle for women's rights, massive urbanization and international efforts to reduce poverty, this book continues to be a vital text for economists, sociologists, development workers, activists and all those who take an active interest in women's social and economic circumstances and problems throughout the world. A substantial new Introduction by Nazneen Kanji, Su Fei Tan and Camilla Toulmin reflects on Boserup's legacy as a scholar and activist, and the continuing relevance of her work. This highlights the key issue of how the role of women in economic development has or has not changed over the past four decades in developing countries, and covers crucial current topics including: women and inequality, international and national migration, conflict, HIV and AIDS, markets and employment, urbanization, leadership, property rights, global processes, including the Millennium Development Goals, and barriers to change.
The words ‘colonised’ and ‘colonising’ have recently been adopted in global North fields such as disability studies, highlighting notions of colonised bodies by colonising practices, with the implication that some or other ‘decolonisation’ is required. But these words remain little more than abstract and dehistoricised metaphors in these Eurocentric academic projects. This paper critically maps out some arguments as to why the colonial encounter is not simply a metaphor and cannot be bypassed in any global disability analysis. The paper argues how this historical event transcends the discursive, a violent materiality framing disability as a historical narrative and human condition, while (re)positioning disability as a useful optic through which to examine the dynamics of imperialism. The colonial provides the landscape for understanding contemporary Southern spaces within which disability is constructed and lived - neocolonised spaces hosting what I call neocolonised bodies. The paper concludes that decolonisation, just like colonialism, is not a metaphor. Instead, it is a continuous violent and political process owned by the global South but open to collaboration, drawing on forms of resistance that have long colonial lineages.
“Grids happen ” writes Brian Massumi , at a moment in Parables for the Virtual where one is tempted to be swept away by the endless affirmative becomings of movement, flux, and potential, as opposed to being pinned down by the retroactive positioning of identity (2002, 8). For the most part, Massumi has been less interested in how grids happen than in asking how they can un-happen, or not happen. What the tension between the two purportedly opposing forces signals, at this junction of scholarly criticism, might be thought of as a dialogue between theories that deploy the subject as a primary analytic frame, and those that highlight the forces that make subject formation tenuous, if not impossible or even undesirable. I have seen this tension manifest acutely in my own work on intersectionality and assemblage theory. On the one hand I have been a staunch advocate of what is now commonly known as an intersectional approach: analyses that foreground the mutually co-constitutive forces of race, class, sex, gender, and nation. Numerous feminist thinkers consider intersectionality the dominant paradigm through which feminist theory has analyzed difference; Leslie McCall argues that intersectionality might be considered “the most important theoretical contribution that women’s studies, in conjunction with other fields, has made so far” (McCall 2005, 1771). Intersectional analysis is now a prevalent approach in queer theory.1 At the same time, encountering a poststructuralist fatigue with the now-predictable yet still necessary demands for subject recognition, I also argued in my book, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, that intersectionality as an intellectual rubric and a tool for political intervention must be supplemented—if not complicated and reconceptualized—by a notion of assemblage. Following Massumi on the “retrospective ordering” of identities such as “gender, race, and sexual orientation” which “back-form their reality,” in Terrorist Assemblages I write, “[I]ntersectional identities and assemblages must remain as interlocutors in tension . . . intersectional identities are the byproducts of attempts to still and quell the perpetual motion of assemblages, to capture and reduce them, to harness their threatening mobility” (Puar 2007, 213). Subject positioning on a grid is never self-coinciding; positioning does not precede movement but rather it is induced by it; epistemological correctives cannot apprehend ontological becomings; the complexity of process is continually mistaken for a resultant product.2
Since the publication of Terrorist Assemblages, in response to anxieties about my apparent prescription to leave intersectionality behind (as if one could), I have often been asked to elaborate on the political usages of assemblages and assemblage theory. A prominent concept in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, assemblage seems to inspire doubt about its political “ applicability,” while intersectionality seems to hold fast as a successful tool for political and scholarly transformation. Part of the assumption at work in these queries is that representation, and its recognized subjects, is the dominant, primary, or most efficacious platform of political intervention, while a Deleuzian nonrepresentational, non-subject-oriented politics is deemed impossible. Perhaps these queries also reveal concerns about how they might be somehow incompatible or even oppositional, despite the fact that intersectionality and assemblage are not analogous in terms of content, utility, or deployment. As analytics, they may not be reconcilable. Yet they need not be oppositional but rather, I argue, frictional.
In what follows, I offer some preliminary thoughts on the limits and possibilities of intersectionality and assemblage and what might be gained by thinking them through and with each other. What are the strengths of each in the realms of theory, political organizing, legal structures, and method? Through highlighting the convivial crossings of these two differentiated but not oppositional genealogies, I offer some thoughts on epistemological correctives in feminist knowledge production—which has been driven, sometimes single-mindedly, by the mandate of intersectional analysis—to see what kinds of futures are possible for feminist theorizing. I reread the formative concept that fueled the metaphoric invocation of intersectionality, specifically Kimberlé Crenshaw’s use of the traffic intersection, to show where intersectionality, as that which retroactively forms the grid and positions on it, and assemblage, as that which is prior to, beyond, or past the grid, not so much intersect...
Public Culture 13.3 (2001) 511-531
The figures of the diseased and the disabled have been at the center of analysis in conceptualizing certain postmodern forms of sociality. Paul Rabinow (1996) formulated the concept of biosociality to suggest the emergence of associational communities around particular biological conditions. Many others (Ginsburg 1989; Rapp 1999) have theorized that major transformations in biotechnology have led to new forms of community in which people with disability or impairment have formed associational relationships in order to act in civil society and to influence, on the one hand, the decisions of the state, and on the other, the course of scientific research. But while such political mobilizations are extremely important in changing the environment of the disabled, they locate the subject positions of the disabled firmly within a liberal political regime. Issues of sexuality and reproduction can only be addressed in such a framework in terms of the legal rights guaranteed by the state to its community of citizens. As Anne Finger (1992: 9) states the issue, "It is easier for us to talk about -- and formulate -- strategies of discrimination in employment, education, and housing, than talk about our exclusion from sexuality and reproduction."
In this essay, we propose to analyze notions of impairment and disability through a reconfiguration of the domestic sphere, offering ethnographic vignettes from the fieldwork we have conducted in different kinds of locations in Delhi. We hope to show that the domestic, once displaced from its conventionally assumed reference to the private, becomes a sphere in which a different kind of citizenship may be enacted -- a citizenship based not on the formation of associational communities, but on notions of publics constituted through voice. The domestic sphere we present, then, is always on the verge of becoming the political. A focus on kinship not as the extension of familial relations into community, but as the sphere in which the family has to confront ways of disciplining and containing contagion and stigma yields startling revelations about disability and impairment as located not in (or only in) individual bodies, but rather as "off" the body of the individual and within a network of social and kin relationships.
Finally, by pairing the notion of the domestic with that of citizenship, we will also suggest that community as imagined by the modern liberal state in India makes state and citizenship complicated entities, and that claims to membership and belonging within the state may be enacted in everyday life in all kinds of dispersed sites. We identify the hospital as one such site, at which the domestic is instantiated performatively in relation to both state- and kinship-bounded figurations of community. Our ethnographic examples are drawn from a study of Punjabi kinship in which Veena Das was engaged in varying intensity from 1974 through 1994, and from a study of hospitalized female psychiatric patients in Delhi conducted by Renu Addlakha from 1990 to 1992.
According to the editors of a recent volume entitled "Defects" (Deutsch and Nussbaum 2000), studies on disability have only recently begun to show an interest in the genealogies of earlier periods. Scholars have begun to take up diverse matters -- femininity as monstrosity; ugliness as aesthetic category; deafness and sign language; the exotic deformed in the early modern and Enlightenment periods -- in order to explore the historical connections between the imagining of community and the construction of normalcy. The category of gender is particularly important for such discussions within disability studies, demonstrating how contingent discursive inscriptions of "defect" could imperil the life projects of female subjects, even in the absence of any functional disability or impairment of the senses. Eighteenth-century European women whose smallpox-scarred faces were rendered "damaged" are one example of defective subjects produced at the intersection of norms of femininity and normalcy (Campbell 2000). Indeed, the importance of the face in defining norms of masculinity and femininity provides a cross-cultural point of entry into this range of issues and shows how defect may produce serious social disability. The example we highlight comes from contemporary Israel.
In surveying the recent literature on disability, we found striking evidence of the conditional character of the parental...
With reference to the ongoing economic "crisis," several European and American scholars discuss the concept and politics of precarity. As their conversation shows, precarity is inextricable from our ever-shifting understandings of bodies, labor, politics, the public sphere, space, life, the human, and what it means to live with others.
Donna Haraway's enduring question—“Why should our bodies end at the skin?” (Haraway 1990, 220)—is ever more relevant in the postmodern era, where issues of bodies, boundaries, and technologies increasingly challenge not only the normative performance of the human subject, but also the very understanding of what counts as human. Critical Disability Studies has taken up the problematic of technology, particularly in relation to the deployment of prostheses by people with disabilities. Yet rehabilitation to normative practice or appearance is no longer the point; instead, the lived experience of disability generates its own specific possibilities that both limit and extend the performativity of the embodied self. I look at what is at stake in the challenge to the Western logos that comes specifically from the capacities of the disabled body, understood not as a less than perfect form of the normative, but as figuring difference in a nonbinary sense. Feminist theory has long contested the isomorphism of the logos, but I go beyond simply setting out the grounds for revaluing multiple variant forms. The feminist turn to Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze opens up the problematic to a celebratory positioning of difference and transcorporeality as the very conditions of life.
Over the last two decades, women have organized against the almost routine violence that shapes their lives. Drawing from the strength of shared experience, women have recognized that the political demands of millions speak more powerfully than the pleas of a few isolated voices. This politicization in turn has transformed the way we understand violence against women. For example, battering and rape, once seen as private (family matters) and aberrational (errant sexual aggression), are now largely recognized as part of a broad-scale system of domination that affects women as a class. This process of recognizing as social and systemic what was formerly perceived as isolated and individual has also characterized the identity politics of people of color and gays and lesbians, among others. For all these groups, identity-based politics has been a source of strength, community, and intellectual development. The embrace of identity politics, however, has been in tension with dominant conceptions of social justice. Race, gender, and other identity categories are most often treated in mainstream liberal discourse as vestiges of bias or domination-that is, as intrinsically negative frameworks in which social power works to exclude or marginalize those who are different. According to this understanding, our liberatory objective should be to empty such categories of any social significance. Yet implicit in certain strands of feminist and racial liberation movements, for example, is the view that the social power in delineating difference need not be the power of domination; it can instead be the source of political empowerment and social reconstruction. The problem with identity politics is not that it fails to transcend difference, as some critics charge, but rather the opposite- that it frequently conflates or ignores intra group differences. In the context of violence against women, this elision of difference is problematic, fundamentally because the violence that many women experience is often shaped by other dimensions of their identities, such as race and class. Moreover, ignoring differences within groups frequently contributes to tension among groups, another problem of identity politics that frustrates efforts to politicize violence against women. Feminist efforts to politicize experiences of women and antiracist efforts to politicize experiences of people of color' have frequently proceeded as though the issues and experiences they each detail occur on mutually exclusive terrains. Al-though racism and sexism readily intersect in the lives of real people, they seldom do in feminist and antiracist practices. And so, when the practices expound identity as "woman" or "person of color" as an either/or proposition, they relegate the identity of women of color to a location that resists telling. My objective here is to advance the telling of that location by exploring the race and gender dimensions of violence against women of color. Contemporary feminist and antiracist discourses have failed to consider the intersections of racism and patriarchy. Focusing on two dimensions of male violence against women-battering and rape-I consider how the experiences of women of color are frequently the product of intersecting patterns of racism and sexism, and how these experiences tend not to be represented within the discourse of either feminism or antiracism... Language: en
The analysis of witchcraft accusations is here extended to the case of persons carrying infection. Inaccurate medical knowledge allows the charge of spreading infection to be used as grounds for exclusion in the same way as the charge of doing harm by witchcraft. In Western Christendom in the mid-twelfth century the social effect of being identified as a leper was loss of civic status; the accused, regarded as a sinner, was removed from public office and not allowed to inherit property or to make legacies. By contrast, in the Eastern Kingdom of Jerusalem during the same period, lepers' civic rights were protected, no association with sin or immorality was attached to the disease, and medical diagnosis was accurate by modern standards. The contrast is explained through an analysis of the social structure and culture of three periods, comparing the strategies of rejection deployed in each.
Intersectional insights and frameworks are put into practice in a multitude of highly contested, complex, and unpredictable ways. We group such engagements with intersectionality into three loosely defined sets of practices: applications of an intersectional framework or investigations of intersectional dynamics; debates about the scope and content of intersectionality as a theoretical and methodological paradigm; and political interventions employing an intersectional lens. We propose a template for fusing these three levels of engagement with intersectionality into a field of intersectional studies that emphasizes collaboration and literacy rather than unity. Our objective here is not to offer pat resolutions to all questions about intersectional approaches but to spark further inquiry into the dynamics of intersectionality both as an academic frame and as a practical intervention in a world characterized by extreme inequalities. At the same time, we wish to zero in on some issues that we believe have occupied a privileged place in the field from the very start, as well as on key questions that will define the field in the future. To that end, we foreground the social dynamics and relations that constitute subjects, displacing what often seems like an undue emphasis on the subjects (and categories) themselves as the starting point of inquiry. We also situate the development and contestation of these focal points of intersectional studies within the politics of academic and social movements—which, we argue, are themselves deeply intersectional in nature and therefore must continually be interrogated as part of the intersectional project.
This innovative and adventurous work, now in paperback, uses broadly feminist and postmodernist modes of analysis to explore what motivates damaging attitudes and practices towards disability. The book argues for the significance of the psycho-social imaginary and suggests a way forward in disability's queering of normative paradigms.
People with disabilities are often relegated to the status of "non-productive labor power" as a key aspect of their social depreciation. Marxist tradition situates potential and unemployable workers as members of the "surplus labor force" (those who embody potential labor and therefore exert downward pressure on wages and job security), but this designation fails to adequately capture those situated essentially outside of Capitalism. While theorists must continue to critique the ravages of poverty that result from chronic unemployment, the article employs Hardt and Negri's concept of multitude as a means of imagining alternative value for "non-productive bodies" (Empire)—particularly in their ability to form alternative networks of existence and resistance to normative relations of consumption, competition, and class conflict. Such an active engagement with concepts of corporeality (i.e. the body as active mediator of the world rather than passive surface of imprintation) is critical to a more fully politicized realization of disability as instrumental to what Spinoza called the "radical potential of true democracy."
Modernity is at the heart of the transformation of impairment into disability. This paper seeks to map out the processes that underpin this claim. Its focus is on the cultures of modernity and post-modernity, and how these complex legacies have constituted and invalidated mental and physical difference. The work of Zygmunt Bauman, particularly his use of the sociology of the (modern) stranger and his redemptive critique of modern and post-modern cultures provides a framework for the discussion. Bauman's work has no explicit connection to Disability Studies, but his sensitivity to modern patterns of exclusion and 'othering' provide not only a useful template to think through the relationship between modernity and disability, but also a useful corrective to the tendency in UK disability studies to ignore the 'cultural turn'.
Reliable, comparable information about the main causes of disease and injury in populations, and how these are changing, is a critical input for debates about priorities in the health sector. Traditional sources of information about the descriptive epidemiology of diseases, injuries, and risk factors are generally incomplete, fragmented, and of uncertain reliability and comparability. The Global Burden of Disease (GBD) Study has provided a conceptual and methodological framework to quantify and compare the health of populations using a summary measure of both mortality and disability, the disability-adjusted life year (DALY). This article describes key features of the Global Burden of Disease analytic approach, the evolution of the GBD starting from the first study for the year 1990, and summarizes the methodological improvements incorporated into GBD revisions carried out by the World Health Organization. It also reviews controversies and criticisms, and examines priorities and issues for future GBD updates. © 2008
The role of women with disabilities in community based inclusive development Barbara Faye Waxman Fiduccia Papers on Women and Girls with Disabilities, Center for Policy Studies
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Making care visible: Women’s unpaid care work in Nepal
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Witness: Rana Plaza factory collapse still plagues survivors
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Going beyond the taboo areas in CBR Part 1: Supporting social relationships, sexuality and reproductive rights of persons with disabilities through CBR
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Becoming-intense, becoming-animal. A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Trans
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Rana Plaza factory collapse survivors struggle one year on
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Attacks on Albinos surge in Tanzania
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Queering performativity: Disability after Deleuze
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Women’s work exposed: New trends and their implications. Women’s rights and economic change
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Art D’Visions? Liverpool: DaDaFest
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A health handbook for women with disabilities Hesperian Foundation
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Misogyny: Witches and Wicked Bodies
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Monitoring the human rights of people with disabilities: Country Report: Andhra Pradesh
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CEO blamed for Bhopal gas disaster dies
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