Global conversations: recovery and detection of Global South multiply-marginalized bodies

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper problematizes, in the spirit of loving critique, the paucity of global intersectional dis/ability politics in the fields of Disability Studies and Critical Race Theory. In this paper, we attempt to account for a more global and humane, liberatory theoretical positioning of Disability Critical Race Theory (DisCrit) by analyzing the human rights discourses employed by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities (UNCRPD). DisCrit scholars emphasize ‘the social construction of race and ability … which sets one outside of the western cultural norms’. We push DisCrit further to (a) account for the impact of these western cultural norms and ideals in global and local contexts, and (b) problematize how the binary between the Global South-Global North gives impetus for and further reifies the global racist and ableist hegemony of western cultural norms, domination, and violence identified within human rights discourses.