Feminist Disability Research Articles

Activating disability care: the formation of collective disability care networks in China’s COVID-19 outbreak

This study examines the evolution and development of two collective care networks formed by and for people with disabilities and their family members during the COVID-19 outbreak in China. Inspired by the feminist disability studies approach to the ethics of care, I traced the interdependent moment in which people with disabilities, their family members, and non-disabled allies were connected in response to the tragic death of a 16-year-old teenager with severe cerebral palsy for the lack of care. This tragedy painfully exemplified the vulnerability of families of disabled people, as well as a care system that disproportionally allocated the care responsibility on the family; it also turned into emotional power that nurtured the emergence of two care networks that provide collective support to families of disabled people, organize the community, as well as generate public, political appeals of policies and legislation surrounding disability care. Points of interest This article pays attention to two collective care networks formed by and for people with disabilities and their family members following the tragic death of a young man with severe disabilities for the lack of care in China’s COVID-19 outbreak. The collective care networks provided collective, social support to families of disabled people, organized the community, as well as generated public, political appeals of policies and legislation surrounding disability care. This article calls for the value of interdependence and the social, collective responsibility of disability care. This article calls for an emancipatory research agenda in Disability Studies to include the study of care through a cross-cultural perspective, and vice versa.

Intersection of discriminations: Experiences of women with disabilities with advanced degrees in professional sector in the United States.

Women with disabilities are typically expected to work in underpaid positions and earn much less when compared with men with disabilities or women without disabilities. In this study, we interviewed women who are at the other end of this spectrum-women with disabilities who were engaged in a high-skilled professional sector. We report their lived experiences and how the intersections of their identities impact, contradict, and collide with the aforementioned assumption. We use feminist disability theory and Crenshaw's theory of intersectionality to inform our research. Research Method/Design: In-depth semistructured qualitative interviews adopting a phenomenological framework were conducted with 37 women with disabilities who hold advanced degrees and work in higher-paying professions. Some of the themes generated from our analysis of the interviews included isolation and hopelessness, a sense of tokenism or de-legitimization, limitations of provided accommodations, the intersection of gender and disability, and how multiple layers of identity fuel marginalization. Despite their success in placement, women with disabilities in the United States still experience numerous barriers in professional sectors. It is imperative to better understand the implications of intersectionality and how discrimination and marginalization can also impact those with successful employment. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

O ENSINO DOS ESTUDOS DA DEFICIÊNCIA: CONTRIBUIÇÕES PARA A FORMAÇÃO EM PSICOLOGIA

Abstract This research aimed to identify the contributions of teaching disability studies to training in psychology from the perspective of participants in a discipline entitled Psychology and People with Disabilities. The locus of the research was a psychology course at a public university in southern Brazil. Information was obtained through the application of a sociodemographic questionnaire and semi-structured interviews with fourteen people who attended the course and analyzed using the thematic analysis technique. The results showed that the knowledge obtained in the discipline contributed to: the appropriation of the social model of disability and the contributions of feminist disability studies; the identification of disabled people as political people; the expansion of the perception of social barriers and; the appropriation of some elements of the Brazilian legislation on disability. Finally, it emphasizes the relevance of disability studies being included in the curriculum for training in psychology from the perspective of human rights.

Intersections of ageism and gender stigma: Exploring long-term care employees' attitudes towards aging

The purpose of this mixed methods, single case study was to explore long-term care (LTC) employees’ attitudes towards age and gender. The intersection of Rosemary Garland-Thomson’s theory of feminist disability (2001) and Hailee Gibbons’ compulsory youthfulness theory (2016) provided the conceptual framework for this project. The sample consisted of 60 LTC direct care employees, all employed at the same organization, who completed an on-line survey during the COVID-19 pandemic. The survey consisted of demographic questions and the Fraboni Scale of Ageism. Twenty-one of these employees participated in a 30-45 minute phone interview. Cultural artifacts were also collected. All data were collected during the COVID-19 pandemic. Although quantitative results showed no statistical significance, qualitative results suggest that employees do exhibit some ageist attitudes towards the residents for whom they care. Despite evidence that most employees felt a deep connection with residents, they detached themselves from the aging process. The theoretical framework lends hand in explaining how both ableism and ageism appeared to contribute to this detachment. Findings indicated employees’ interactions and attitudes towards residents were influenced by themes compassionate ageism, ableism, and identity, which resulted in meta theme caregiver validation and reward. Employees received validation and altruistic reward from positive interactions with what they perceived to be “ideal” residents; those who fit the stereotype of a nursing home resident, such as older, pleasant, and dependent. The perceived “ideal” residents varied by gender. Generally, female residents were expected to be more independent and at times viewed negatively when requesting assistance.

Theorising liminal states of health: A spatio‐temporal analysis of undiagnosis and anticipatory diagnosis in the shadow of toxic pollution

AbstractThis paper demonstrates how greater engagement with liminality – as a concept and lived experience – can expand scholarly conceptualisations of health/disease in contaminated spaces. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Sri Lanka's dry zone between 2013 and 2017, I focus on residents' encounters with chronic kidney disease diagnosis in a region where the causes of illness are uncertain, the consequences of disease are often deadly, and the possibilities of developing sickness in the future are both unpredictable and ever‐present. Specifically, I examine how residents of kidney disease hotspots negotiate various attempts to categorise them as being, or not being, healthy in ways that give rise to experiences of liminality. Building on work in feminist disability studies, I conceptualise “undiagnosis” and “anticipatory diagnosis” as two such liminal states of health that reconfigure medical and social practices in the dry zone. As part of this analysis, I explain why residents are so reluctant to get screened for kidney disease and demonstrate how they strategically mobilise moments of “undiagnosis” to resist patient subjectivities and prolong existing lifeways. I then turn to a discussion of anticipatory diagnosis, which describes the practice of re‐classifying residents of disease hotspots who are not yet sick as embodying the potential to become ill at any time. Frequently deployed by the state, medical practitioners, and non‐dry zone communities, I demonstrate how this practice collapses categories of “at‐risk” and “diseased” in external categorisations of residents' future health status. In short, liminality comes to be embodied through the constant anticipation of disease despite uncertainty about who will actually become sick and why. Tying these experiences together, I elucidate how geography matters to the constitution of liminal states of health and crucially demonstrate how this liminality helps reproduce place attachments as well as forms of geographic differentiation in the shadow of toxic contamination.

“‘I’m not weird. I’m just like everybody else’: intersections of embodiment, incarceration, and mental illness on Wentworth and Orange Is the New Black”

ABSTRACT Applying a critical feminist disability studies framework, I look closely at televisual women inmates with mental illness to demonstrate how the dynamics between one’s body and one’s environment contribute to their disabilities. With an examination of three characters from two prominent prison shows (Wentworth and Orange Is the New Black), I discuss how each character’s mental illness operates as commentary for embodiment and the ideology of femininity, the politics of appearance, and unaddressed trauma. I address the following research questions: First, how is the portrayal of mental illness commentary on broader feminist concerns? Second, why are some characters with mental illnesses portrayed in a more sympathetic light while others are not, and how do these choices challenge the dominant ideology of normalcy? And third, how does this commentary showcase the varying nature around societally constructed intersections of women, mental health, and criminality? Ultimately, I argue that while Wentworth showcases how prison can help stabilize characters with more well-known and/or common mental illnesses, OITNB instead depicts how the carceral system can exacerbate them. Despite this difference, both prison shows humanize characters with more well-known and common mental illnesses and vilify characters with lesser known (or lesser common) mental illnesses.

Blood don’t lie: Writing sickness after Flannery O’Connor

“Blood don’t lie” is a work of creative nonfiction that seeks to understand writing and sickness through the work of Flannery O’Connor. By analysing her correspondence, biographical details, ephemera and three short stories, this essay applies a feminist disability studies reading to her work and asks: to what extent can the experience of sickness be read “backwards”, from biography to fiction; from reading to reader; and, in the case of both O’Connor and the author, from generation to generation? It identifies the thematic concerns of her work – family, time, sickness and body – and emphasises how they might be employed to counter the resistance of pain to description in language and, further, to explain the relationship between language, power and otherness in writing about sickness. By combining techniques from literary criticism, biography and autobiography in a hybrid form, it produces new writing towards a speculative literature of sickness.

Stamped allegories of disability: representations of the disabled body on postage stamps

This study examines the representations of the disabled body by unpicking the messages transferred through the artistic illustrations of disability found in 250 postage stamps. The theoretical framework employed derives from cultural, critical and feminist disability studies, while the tripartite model of disability served as a critical framework to the analysis of the representations of the disabled body. The first-level coding led in the classification of postage stamps into eight categories according to the impairment. The second-level coding involved visual semiotic analysis for an in-depth cross-categorical analysis with emphasis on the representation of the disabled body on a number of selected stamps and is presented in two main sections: (i) the disabled body as the impaired body and (ii) the disabled body among other bodies. Such research is useful for disability studies and its interdisciplinary directions that seek to challenge dominant oppressive representations and rhetoric around the disabled body.

Cripping the Welfare Queen

AbstractDrawing together feminist- and queer-of-color critique with disability theory, this essay offers a literary-cultural reframing of the welfare queen in light of critical discourses of disability. It does so by taking up the discourse of dependency that casts racialized, low-income, and disabled populations as drains on the state, reframing this discourse as a potential site of coalition among antiracist, anticapitalist, and feminist disability politics. Whereas antiwelfare policy cast independence as a national ideal, this analysis of the welfare mother elaborates a version of disability and women-of-color feminism that not only takes dependency as a given but also mines the figure of the welfare mother for its transformative potential. To imagine the welfare mother as a site for reenvisioning dependency, this essay draws on the “ruptural possibilities” of minority literary texts, to use Roderick A. Ferguson’s coinage, and places Sapphire's 1996 novel Push in conversation with Jesmyn Ward's 2011 novel Salvage the Bones. Both novels depict young Black mothers grappling with the disabling context of public infrastructural abandonment, in which the basic support systems for maintaining life—schools, hospitals, social services—have become increasingly compromised. As such, these novels enable an elaboration of a critical disability politic centered on welfare queen mythology and its attendant structures of state neglect, one that overwrites the punitive logics of public resource distribution. This disability politic, which the author terms crip-of-color critique, foregrounds the utility of disability studies for feminist-of-color theories of gendered and sexual state regulation and ushers racialized reproduction and state violence to the forefront of disability analysis.

Ableism in academic knowledge production

The article takes up feminist disability scholars’ request for an integration of disability (theory) into women’s and gender studies and intends to take stock of the status and development of this integration. By means of qualitative content analysis, excerpts of German and US handbooks of gender research are examined for their degree of integrating disability (theory) and for inherent ableism. Considering the scholars’ requests of full integration and a subsequent transformation of gender research the sample shows only minor signs of change and the request must be upheld.

"The Strength to Leave": Women With Disabilities Navigating Violent Relationships and Occupational Identities.

Being in an intimate relationship is a desired occupation for many people, in particular for women living in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), where relationships can provide material support, intimacy, and social integration and increase chances of survival. To explore accounts of navigating intimate relationships from women with disabilities in Sierra Leone. A qualitative study was conducted, guided by a critical occupational approach and informed by feminist disability scholarship. Data were generated through interviews and analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. Community-based across four districts of Sierra Leone. Thirteen women with disabilities were recruited by means of snowball and purposive sampling. Four themes were generated that illuminated the women's experiences of intimate relationships as viewed through the lens of gender and disability dimensions. The overarching theme, "violence in intimate relationships," describes the incidences of violence and abuse they experienced. "Becoming a wife" explores the women's occupational identity wishes. "Leaving as an occupational rupture" illuminates the actions the women took to end the relationship. "Mothering as an occupational identity and resource" focuses on the women's role as mothers and transitions in their occupations. Taking their unique narratives into account draws attention to how the women have met their occupational needs and resisted occupational injustices, enabled by social and structural supports, including their children, disability social benefits, and their engagement in the disability rights movement. Implications are directed at socially committed occupational therapists to address systemic issues of disability- and gender-based violence. What This Article Adds: This study adds much-needed knowledge in an area in which there is a paucity of research: the experiences of women with disabilities being in an intimate relationship as a social occupation in an LMIC. The results illuminate the importance of considering the systemic issues that affect the social occupations of women with disabilities, particularly in light of the shift within occupational therapy practice toward developing a socially transformative focus.

Solidarity in Falling Apart

In this essay, I reconceptualize feminized trauma by utilizing a queer crip feminist disability justice framework. This reconceptualizing allows for an intervention in both historical psychoanalytic and contemporary biomedical framings of the experience of gendered and sexual violence, pursuant or sequelic trauma, and associated symptoms. Both historical and contemporary psycho-logics too often imagine gendered and sexual violence as abnormal or exceptional events (e.g., “stranger rape”) which can be treated and cured individually, thus delimiting them within a white, wealthy or middle-class, cis- and hetero-feminine register. As a corrective, within the framework of everyday emergencies, insidious traumas, and cripistemologies of crisis, I position feminine fracturing and falling apart as chronic, and consider abolitionist strategies for survival, care, and solidarity beyond traditional medical frameworks for recovery. This further provides a way to understand dissociation or rather dissociative-adjacent symptomology as real, legitimate, and painful, yet also as sociopolitical products experienced differently across diverse populations—and as mundane, banal, and even expected for some. Here, feminine fracturing is symptom, method, and potential avenue for change or liberation. What does “recovery” look like when feminized trauma is endemic to the point of being so normalized and unexceptional as to be a thoroughly unremarkable part of our everyday cultural backdrop? How is this exacerbated when we examine the experiences of trans women, poor women, and immigrant and BIPOC women and femmes? I posit that there is promise in embracing a fracturing, in falling apart—as antidote to the normative and neoliberal logic of keeping it together.

Drawing Torah from Troubling Texts

Abstract This article argues for the importance of developing queer feminist disability ethics in ways that push beyond the conventional canon, acknowledging the violence present in many traditional texts and their failures to do justice to lived disability experience. Critiquing a famous debate in the Babylonian Talmud, Ketubot 17a, in which Hillel and Shammai debate the permissibility of telling a lie in order to praise the beauty of a disabled bride at her wedding, the author argues for a Jewish disability ethics that engages secular disability arts. Examining the artistry of queer disabled dancer Claire Cunningham, the essay draws out the embodied ethical insights expressed through disability arts and argues that Cunningham's work offers a more compelling answer to the Talmud's question—in her claim that love lodges in the tangible acts of paying attention to another.

Drawing Torah from Troubling Texts: Gender, Disability, and Jewish Feminist Ethics

Abstract This article argues for the importance of developing queer feminist disability ethics in ways that push beyond the conventional canon, acknowledging the violence present in many traditional texts and their failures to do justice to lived disability experience. Critiquing a famous debate in the Babylonian Talmud, Ketubot 17a, in which Hillel and Shammai debate the permissibility of telling a lie in order to praise the beauty of a disabled bride at her wedding, the author argues for a Jewish disability ethics that engages secular disability arts. Examining the artistry of queer disabled dancer Claire Cunningham, the essay draws out the embodied ethical insights expressed through disability arts and argues that Cunningham's work offers a more compelling answer to the Talmud's question—in her claim that love lodges in the tangible acts of paying attention to another.

Polysemic Interpretations: Examining How Women with Visual Impairments Incorporate, Resist, and Subvert Advertising Content

This article takes a feminist disability studies approach to the analysis of the responses of women with visual impairments to representations of blindness, disability, and gender in advertising. Empirical data gathered via semi-structured interviews with women who are visually impaired (N = 5) enhances existing understandings of oppressed audiences’ polysemic interpretations of advertisements. The research findings reveal participants’ subversion of stereotypical approaches to visual impairments, ocularcentrism, and gendered constructions of blindness, which are found in advertisements (N = 3) produced post-2000 in the United Kingdom and United States. Participants highlighted subtle stereotyping in advertisements through exploring the intersecting nature of disability and gender identities. Advertisements were used by participants as prompts for reasserting their affirmative senses of self and as a means of critiquing sociocultural attitudes toward women with visual impairments. Recommendations for future research and practice in relation to advertising polysemy and the representation of disabled women in advertising are provided.

Neuroqueer Feminism: Turning with Tenderness toward Borderline Personality Disorder

This article proposes neuroqueer feminism as an intersectional theoretical model through which to recognize neurodiversity among women (and all minoritized genders) and to resist the stigmatization of neurodivergent people, using feminist scholarship on borderline personality disorder (BPD) as a case study through which to illustrate the need for this new lens. By approaching BPD as a complex, historically misogynistic, yet still salient term for emotion dysregulation, this analysis recasts personality disorders from the traditional medical classification as character defects to the less pejorative language of extreme or anomalous neurobiological states, a linguistic shift modeled on physical disability studies and aligned with the neuroqueer movement. While feminist scholars call regularly to rename BPD or abolish the category, positioning the condition as an artifact of institutional sexism and misogyny, neuroqueer feminism prioritizes destigmatizing borderline personality disorder and invokes feminist disability studies as a framework through which to accomplish this work. Neuroqueer feminism will be nonbinary, postoppositional, pain-centric, and stigmaphilic, turning with tenderness toward borderline personality disorder as a neurologically queer intersectional embodiment. Through a series of friendly disagreements with feminist BPD studies—a field I divide into borderline defenders, befrienders, and up-enders—I define the major tenets of neuroqueer feminism, introduce the problem of neurotypical feminism, and contemplate new directions for feminist BPD studies, including the disruption of its pervasive whiteness.

Yes! We are girls with disabilities and Yes! We can represent ourselves in policy dialogue

abstract This paper is located within a critical feminist disability studies theoretical framework. It aims to illuminate the significant contribution made by girls with disabilities during the process of drawing up the National Disability Policy for Zimbabwe. A purposive sampling approach was used to select participants, and focus group and plenary discussions were held to generate data, with a thematic analysis approach used to analyse data. Several themes were constructed, but the focus of this paper is on themes that arose from focus group discussions with girls with disabilities: 1) living arrangements; 2) access to physical infrastructure and information; 3) music and sport; 4) education; 5) health and 6) disaster risk management. Findings show that girls with disabilities can make a significant contribution to national policy-making processes; hence there is a need to initiate strategies that create space for them to lead or participate in national policy dialogue.

Modernism and Physical Illness: Sick Books by Peter Fifield

Reviewed by: Modernism and Physical Illness: Sick Books by Peter Fifield Jennifer Marchisotto (bio) MODERNISM AND PHYSICAL ILLNESS: SICK BOOKS, by Peter Fifield. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. 249 pp. $80.00. Peter Fifield sets the parameters for Modernism and Physical Illness in his introduction. He is primarily concerned with close readings of physical illnesses as they appear in modernist novels (1-30). Fifield's analysis is deeply invested in the ways aesthetic representations of physical illness align with modernist sensibilities overall: "the greater part of the significance of illness lies beyond any strict or exclusive version of the medical. Indeed, in some cases the medical is felt explicitly as a framing perspective that distorts or overlooks qualities of experience and meaning that are created by illness" (27). One of the main tensions within the book is the relationship between the individual experience of and the socio-political ramifications of illness. Through his analyses of D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Dorothy Richardson, and Winifred Holtby, Fifield gradually shows the ways in which these authors draw on personal experiences of illness as a part of their creative oeuvres to position bodily sickness as both individual and collective experiences. Fifield's chapters are organized around individual authors, and each builds upon the previous ones as the authors increasingly engage with the social experience through their representations of illness. Fifield's chapters on Richardson and Holtby are the most generative in their discussion. In his analysis, Fifield shows how illness as a modernist aesthetic is not isolated but can also have sociopolitical ramifications. In the penultimate chapter, "'You ought to be supported by the state!': Dorothy Richardson and the Politics of Care" (145-82), Fifield argues, "[Richardson] uses illness to examine the nature of sympathy and the structures of responsibility in a complex, modern, urban society. Illness is depicted as a pressing issue for onlookers, an often-troubling demand for concern and treatment. … [I]n Richardson [sick bodies] prompt questions of care at individual, social, and political scales" (145-46). In his close reading of Richardson's Pilgrimage,1 Fifield ultimately concludes that the text builds on his reading of Woolf's "On Being Ill" (4-14),2 showing illness to be an individually overwhelming event while also situating it as part of culturally defined experience. The disgust with illness he locates in Eliot's work is now something requiring a response as part of our social responsibility to one another. Fifield's analysis of Holtby (183-222) further shows how representations of illness are connected to cultural attitudes towards sickness, particularly in the way a lack of representation aligns with the silencing of the female middle class (185). Fifield's close readings of both Richardson and Holtby are the most engaging, especially in the way he connects the authors' texts to contemporary social concerns about the body, hygiene, and class. [End Page 572] Situating their writings as part of more explicit cultural contexts gives further weight to his overall argument and leads to a dynamic engagement with the different valences upon which illness functions. Fifield's reading, with regard to the works of Richardson and Holtby, aligns closely with the social model of disability and would benefit from more engagement with disability studies. He explains his reasoning for not including disability studies as a part of the text in his introduction: "Disability therefore frequently implies continuity: it is stable and protracted, constituting a sustained, meaningful and fully valid form of living" (15). For Fifield, this definition excludes physical sickness which is more variable in its appearance and effects. Disability studies, however, have moved away from this definition and encompass the study of chronic illness (like many of those discussed by Fifield) as well as mental cognitive disorders. Researchers in feminist disability studies, including such scholars as Susan Wendell, Elizabeth J. Donaldson, and Jasbir K. Puar,3 have all taken up disability in expanded ways to account for the myriad usages in which it occurs that are often unstable. In his epilogue, Fifield concludes, "My illness is thus both private—this is my running nose or sore stomach and nobody else's—and collective—it is experienced in the first...

Abolishing the Broom Closets in Omelas: Feminist Disability Analysis of Crisis and Precarity

Abolishing the Broom Closets in Omelas: Feminist Disability Analysis of Crisis and Precarity

Leaky Masculinities, Porous Nations, Queercrip Affiliations

Vulnerable Constitutions draws together queer studies and feminist disability studies to produce new visions of queercrip masculinity in twentieth-century US literature and culture. Introducing the concept of "antiprophylactic citizenship," this monograph redefines the contours of masculinity not as invulnerability, but as radical openness, revealing the transformative properties of leaky boundaries in terms of the body as well as the nation-state. Barounis's meditations on immunity, masculinity, and the viral speak presciently to a world altered by pandemics and mass debility.