Feminist Disability Studies

Abstract

Feminist disability studies is an emergent interdisciplinary field of inquiry shaped by a productive yet tense dialogue between feminist studies and disability studies. It is framed as a collaborative enterprise between feminist studies, which highlights vectors through which social relations and bodies are gendered and sexed, and disability studies, which focuses on the ways socio‐medico‐legal discourses and practices construct impaired bodies as disabled (Thomson 2002). Both feminist studies and disability studies emerged out of twentieth‐century political projects emphasizing social justice and collective action. Intellectually, both fields address questions about subject formation, power, bodies, subjugated knowledges, and normalization. Feminist disability studies is kin to and stands alongside other critical, identity‐based scholarship aimed at social justice, including queer theory, critical race theory, gender studies, and ethnic studies.