Disability, Girlhood, and Vulnerability in Transnational Contexts

Abstract

When we first proposed this special issue on “Disability and Girlhood: Transnational Perspectives,” we had not yet realized how the urgency in the global humanitarian crises that has escalated in intensity and scope of violence in recent months would demand our thoughtful attention. These crises, the outcomes of social protest, wars, and genocidal acts in many parts of the world for over a decade, punctuated by the Paris bombings of November 2015 that took the lives of 130 innocent citizens; the widespread displacement of 4 million Syrian refugees from their homeland; the increased militarization at the borders of the European Union and the United States; and the environmental impact of this war of terror on the daily survival of disabled and non-disabled people around the globe continue unabated. On the internet, photographic images of women and children with disabilities (and girls in particular) serve as the very embodiment of vulnerability in competition with thousands of other images of suffering (see for instance, Human Rights Watch 2012) vying for the attention of an impatient and fickle global audience (Goggin 2009; Kim 2011). In these images, disability, seen to be synonymous with vulnerability becomes simultaneously hypervisible in its ability to trigger an affective response and hyper-invisible when inspiring an emancipatory response to the material consequences of actually living with a disability. This special volume includes contributions from academics, activists, and service providers who engage with the intersectional domains of disability, gender, and humanitarian praxis. While vulnerability was not even mentioned in the call for submissions, we found that the affective politics of vulnerability appears as an “absent presence” (Ferri and Connor 2010: 106) in every submission included here. Vulnerability, when we use the term to refer to an individual or a group, makes “specific claims about differential power, as well as ... acknowledge[ing] the speaker’s own feelings of the