Disability and Feminism

Week of 10/31-11/6

This week I thought it would be interesting to appeal to the gender based ideas and notions about disability, specifically how feminist theory is transformed by it. My girlfriend was wondering if the issues surrounding disabled people also recognized disability in identities that reflect women. Our talk took the issues of feminist theory and categorized methods and perspectives that could be used to delve deeper into disability studies, even though feminist theory may live in the assumptions that particularizes and narrows a theory, even though doesn’t really do much to broaden into the academic and scholarly world.
After using the Disabilities Studies Reader, Rosemarie Garland-Thompson writes another useful chapter on this topic. She states that her juxtaposing of disability and feminism invokes and links two notions fundamental to the feminist movement. The first is integration, which suggests achieving parity by fully including that which has been excluded and subordinated. The second is transformation, which suggests reimagining established knowledge and the order of things. In her allusions to both these concepts, she sets the project and study of disability into a relation of feminism that supposes it between intellectual work and commitment to creating a more just, equitable, and integrated society.
So what does feminism disability studies approach as topics? For one, it tries to foster a more complex understanding of the body and its cultural history. Disability, like gender, is an issue that pervades all aspects of culture, especially in its institutions, social identities, practices, historical communities, and shared human experience of embodiment and normalcy. So in a way, feminist theory introduces the ability/disability system as a category of analysis in all topics related to feminism. The critical areas in which critical inquiries are the most profound can be found in the domains of representation, the body, identity, and activism. She finds that the particular espouses the partial and provisional. But such an intellectual habit can be informed by disability and acceptance. To embrace disability and feminism, to embrace the flawed body of disability, is to critique the normalizing fantasies of wholeness, unity, coherence, and completeness of something that centers around contradiction, ambiguity, and partiality incarnate. Disability issues, like gender issues, are all around us, we just have to know where to begin to unravel these issues to understand what it truly means to be fully huma