Feminist Disability Studies

Abstract

Feminist disability studies (FDS) is an exploration of how categories of gender and disability, along with other identities, intersect. FDS emerged out of disabled women narrating their material and embodied experiences in order to transform sexist and ableist spaces. FDS seeks to articulate how gender operates as a regulatory system in the lives of disabled individuals. FDS's focus on the body including reproductive technologies, sexual access, and discourses of beauty and perfection considers how systems of oppression, including ableism, sexism, racism, classism, and heteronormativity, interlock in the lives of disabled women. FDS also seeks to complicate feminist ideas of independence, agency, and care labor by bringing disabled perspectives as worthy of analysis and theorization. FDS is both interdisciplinary in its investigation and multidisciplinary in its origins as many of the foundational texts are found in academic traditions from sociology, philosophy, and literary studies. FDS can complicate meanings of able‐bodiedness and disability identity and inform theories of intersectionality by foregrounding an analysis of how ableism intersects with racism, classism, sexism, and other interlocking systems of oppression.