Re-shaping, Re-thinking, Re-defining: __________________________ Feminist Disability Studies by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson Barbara Waxman Fiduccia Papers on Women and Girls with Disabilities Center for Women Policy Studies 2001 About the Center for Women Policy Studies Since its founding in 1972 as the nation’s first interviews, surveys and secondary data feminist policy research organization, the Center analysis. for Women Policy Studies has been on the front lines of efforts to promote justice and equality for ANALYZES POLICY AND LEGISLATION women. We analyze federal and state policies and legislative initiatives and develop policy options. 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ISBN #1-877966-74-6 TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface………………………………………………………….. i Introduction…………………………………………………….. 1 Disability Studies………………………………………. 1 Feminist Studies………………………………..……… 3 Feminist Disability Studies……………………………………. 4 Aspects of Feminist Disability Studies……………..... 6 Representation…………………………………. 6 The Body………………………………………... 9 The Politics of Medicalization…………. 10 The Politics of Appearance……………. 12 Identity…………………………………………… 15 Activism………………………………………….. 18 Notes…………………………………………………………….. 21 About The Author………………………………………………. 25 About The Center for Women Policy Studies i PREFACE In 1999, at the urging of our sister/colleague Barbara Faye Waxman Fiduccia, the Center for Women Policy Studies launched a new series of publications on women and girls with disabilities – beginning with two groundbreaking reports, Violence Against Disabled Women: Research and Data in Brief and Women and Girls with Disabilities: Defining the Issues – An Overview. Barbara envisioned and co-authored both of these reports and together we began to make plans for several additional reports and for a larger program of policy leadership and training for activist disabled women. Sadly, we lost Barbara in April of 2001 and we will always miss her great and powerful spirit and her passion to ensure the full human rights of women and girls with disabilities. We continue this work, therefore, in her name, in her feminist spirit, and in her memory. This report, written by leading Feminist Disability Studies scholar/activist Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, launches the Center’s Barbara Waxman Fiduccia Papers on Women and Girls with Disabilities. As Barbara and I noted in the Introduction to Women and Girls with Disabilities: Defining the Issues – An Overview: “Disabled women and girls are of all ages, all racial, ethnic, religious, and socioeconomic backgrounds and sexual orientations; they live in rural, urban and suburban communities. Disabled women and girls live at the corner of disability and womanhood – with two ‘minority’ identities, a double dose of discrimination and stereotyping and multiple barriers to achieving their life goals. While many women with disabilities derive enormous strength, resilience and creativity from their multiple identities, they also face the consequences of discrimination. Yet, the self-defined needs of women with disabilities remain on the margins of the social justice movements that should represent them – the women’s movement, the disability rights movement, and the civil rights movement – leaving disabled women and girls of all backgrounds essentially invisible.” The Center for Women Policy Studies presents the Barbara Waxman Fiduccia Papers on Women and Girls with Disabilities as our small contribution to ending this invisibility and bringing the self-defined needs of women and girls with disabilities to policy makers, advocates, educators, and the general public. ii We are especially grateful to Susan O’Hara and the True North Foundation for their generous support for the development and production of this series of reports. And we remain grateful to Felicia Lynch, former president of Women and Philanthropy, for her visionary leadership in bringing the self-defined needs of women with disabilities to philanthropy. Leslie R. Wolfe President Center for Women Policy Studies September 2001 1 INTRODUCTION DISABILITY STUDIES: personal misfortune or individual The broad cultural impulse inadequacy. toward “minority” enfranchisement and inclusion Disability Studies originally arose that produced the civil rights in the academy from Sociology movement in the 1960s and the and has developed more recently feminist movement in the 1970s in the Humanities where it is an led as well to the disability rights area of critical inquiry that is movement – expressed by the parallel to, informed by, and Americans with Disabilities Act of overlapping with Feminist 1990, the most comprehensive Studies. In its broadest sense, civil rights bill yet for people with Disability Studies in the disabilities. This landmark law Humanities undertakes a radical requires both the public and critique of disability. The private sectors to accommodate fundamental premise of Disability the corporeal and functional Studies is that disability is a differences we think of as culturally fabricated narrative of disabilities. the body, a system that produces subjects by differentiating and As disability has been recast as a marking bodies. civil rights issues, the emergent academic discipline of Disability This comparison of bodies Studies also has reframed the legitimates the distribution of concept of disability by placing it resources, status, and power in a social context – what is within a biased social and called an ethnicity model – architectural environment. As showing that the social problems such, disability has four aspects: and judgments of inferiority that first, it is a system for interpreting disabled people face are bodily variations; second, it is a produced by their interaction with relationship between bodies and a cultural environment, both their environments; third, it is a material and psychological, that set of practices that produce both is at odds either with the the able-bodied and the disabled; functioning or the configuration of and fourth, it is a way of their bodies. Disability Studies describing the inherent instability views the condition of having a of the embodied self. disability as a social relationship characterized by discrimination Disability is a broad term within and oppression rather than as a which cluster ideological 2 categories as varied as sick, becomes intense, extravagant, deformed, ugly, old, maimed, and problematic. afflicted, abnormal, or debilitated – all of which disadvantage Disability, then, is the unorthodox people by devaluing bodies that made flesh, refusing to be do not conform to certain cultural normalized, neutralized, or standards. Thus, disability homogenized. More important, in functions to preserve and validate an era governed by the abstract such privileged designations as principle of universal equality, beautiful, healthy, normal, fit, disability signals that the body competent, intelligent – all of cannot be universalized. Shaped which provide cultural capital to by history, defined by those who can claim such status particularity, and at odds with its and reside within these social environment, disability confounds identities. It is, then, the various any notion of a generalizable, interactions between bodies and stable physical state of being. world that create disability from The cripple before the stairs, the the raw material of human blind person before the printed variation and precariousness. page, the deaf person before the radio, the amputee before the Disability demands a reckoning typewriter, and the dwarf before with the messiness of bodily the counter are all proof that the variety, with literal individuation myriad structures and practices