Visionary Politics and Methods in Feminist Disability Studies

Abstract

In this introduction we explore the genealogies and methodologies of feminist disability studies (FDS). A feminist methodology is politically situated with a focus on the material conditions and social and cultural structures that marginalized people bear, experience, and resist. Methods, and the theories that underpin and create those methodological tools, can open or foreclose possibilities for praxis. Considering theory and method as mutually informative intellectual projects, we ask, how can our methods influence political investments that open up visionary possibilities and plans? How can we take a coalitional approach to disability politics as a method that is informed by collaboration, rather than appropriation? How can we put both our theories and methods to work in service of a justice-oriented praxis? Furthermore, we take a feminist disability studies lens to the concept of academic rigor. With the academy’s delegitimation of the production of marginalized knowledge by marginalized people, and the ensuing defenses and institutionalization of these knowledges as indeed rigorous, a feminist disability studies method proposes that we no longer defend the rigorousness of marginalized scholarship, but rather discard rigor as a benchmark for valid and valuable research.