Disability and Women’s Writing

Abstract

Disability studies has a long relationship with feminist theory and gender studies. Several texts in early disability studies, such as Michelle Fine and Adrienne Asch's Women with Disabilities (1988) and Susan Wendell's The Rejected Body (1996), emphasize the need to explore disability in women's lives as well as the intersection between feminist and disability politics. As a result, feminist disability studies is a recognized and important area of study that can inform any reading of women's literature. In her foundational essay, “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory,” Rosemarie Garland-Thomson argues that disability studies and feminist theory can have a mutually beneficial relationship because both have something to learn from and contribute to the other. Garland-Thomson writes that integrating disability into feminist theory does not limit the focus to women with disabilities nor foreclose engagement with race, class, sexuality, or other vectors of power; rather, “[i]ntegrating disability clarifies how this aggregate of systems operates together, yet distinctly, to support an imaginary norm and structure the relations that grant power, privilege, and status to that norm.” Feminist disability theory, therefore, uses a universalizing, rather than minoritizing view of disability, understanding it as part of a broad system of privilege and oppression, based on notions of ability and disability, which interprets, defines, disciplines, and produces bodily and cognitive variation. Feminist disability theory can also draw attention to ableism within women's literature and feminist scholarship. For example, Alison Kafer notes that Marge Piercy's feminist utopian novel Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) envisions a future in which disabled bodies do not exist. In fact, in order to imagine a world without oppression, Piercy does away with racial, class, sexuality, and ability differences altogether, suggesting an inability for society to contain difference without creating hierarchy and prejudice. Equality in the text is produced through sameness: similar light brown skin tones, no gendered labor, equal access to resources, and everyone is able-bodied. Kafer argues that the erasure of disability particularly is emblematic of a larger social bias.