Feminist Theory Multimedia Project 2-Feminist Disability Theory by Emma Laing

How Feminist and Disability Theory Come Together

emmaalinelaing — 2025-03-01 02:31:28 UTC

In a conceptual climate that views men's bodies as the normal and ideal, women are at heightened risk of being segregated and disrespected and being deemed deficient in physical or mental strength or health. Also consequential has been the high frequency of assignment of women (rather than men) to the caretaking of individuals with disabilities, a social arrangement that usually burdens and frequently fails to recognize or materially reward those who must occupy this role and therefore one that unfairly disadvantages women.

What is Feminist Disability Theory? And Why is it Important?

emmaalinelaing — 2025-03-01 02:43:34 UTC

Feminist disability studies reimagines

disability. Feminism challenges the belief that femaleness is a natural form of physical and mental deficiency or constitutional unruliness. Feminist disability studies similarly questions our assumptions that disability is a flaw, lack, or excess. To do so, it defines disability broadly from a social rather than a medical perspective.

Just as feminism questions the assumption that femaleness constitutes a natural physical and mental inferiority, disability studies challenges social constructions that deem disability a natural deficiency. Like gender, disability pervades cultural practices, politics, social structures and social identities. Both disability studies and feminist theory address reproductive rights, bodily difference, medicalisation of the body and the politics of appearance to name a few. Therefore, integrating disability into feminist theory challenges our assumptions of the body and enriches our understandings of human diversity.

emmaalinelaing — 2025-03-01 02:48:48 UTC

In the civil rights movement era, feminist and disability approaches to architectural design emerged to address the problems of spatial segregation. Activists argued that inaccessible built environments—such as segregated lunch counters, workplaces without childcare, suburban single-family homes, and buildings with stairs and without ramps—made oppressed people less visible and, therefore, less likely to receive legislative protections Throughout the 60s and 70s, disability activists physically occupied public buildings in order to demonstrate that law and society had failed to include them. The efforts of these activists resulted in the passage of federal civil rights legislation that aspired to protect the access of people with disabilities to the built environment

Accessibility and Universal Design in Feminist Disability Theory

emmaalinelaing — 2025-03-01 18:08:49 UTC

Some relevent conterversy in feminist disability theory has been architcturural design and how that perpetrates these systems of oppression for anyone who isn't considered to have the standard body. Supposedly neutral design often privileges the most common bodies through the "normative template" of which the majority of architecture is designed around which caters to white, male, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied, and middle-class bodies. When the normate serves as a neutral template for design, what emerges is a built environment that is accessible only to certain bodies. Intersectionality must consider how the normate template for the built environment is a system of exclusion that segregates spaces and people along the axes of disability, race, class, and gender.

Acessible design is something that makes this topic important to me as a designer myself I want to make sure that the things that I design are able to be beneficial and enjoyed by all people which means taking disability into account.

What Counts as Disability Controversy

emmaalinelaing — 2025-03-01 18:21:23 UTC

One thing we must remain aware of when discussing disability is: who counts as disabled? Often when we think about disability, we conjure up an image of visible impairment which can reinforce a narrow perception of disability.

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson

emmaalinelaing — 2025-03-01 18:29:29 UTC

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson is a disability justice and culture thought leader, bioethicist, teacher, and humanities scholar. Her 2016 editorial, “Becoming Disabled,” was the inauguralarticle in the ongoing weekly series in the New York Times about disability by people living with disabilities.Her book Extraordinary Bodies, published in 1997, is a founding text in the disability studies canon.

She is a professor of English and bioethics at Emory University, where she teaches disability studies, bioethics, American literature and culture, and feminist theory. Her work develops the field of critical disability studies in the health humanities to bring forward disability access, inclusion, and identity to a broad range of institutions and communities.

Susan Wendell

emmaalinelaing — 2025-03-01 18:34:50 UTC

Susan Wendell is Associate Professor of Women's Studies at Simon Fraser University, British Columbia. Susan Wendell has lived with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome since 1985. In her book The Rejected Body, she connects her own experience of illness to feminist theory and the literature of disability. The Rejected Body argues that feminist theorizing has been skewed toward non-disabled experience, and that the knowledge of people with disabilities must be integrated into feminist ethics, discussions of bodily life, and the criticism of the cognitive and social authority of medicine.

Inclusive Feminism

emmaalinelaing — 2025-03-01 18:41:39 UTC

Disability as a category of identity is often omitted in rhetoric about intersectionality, which usually considers race and gender, with some consideration of other identities. However, disability like other identities is socially constructed, and liable to misrepresentation and is often siloed from other issues and experiences. Someone identifying as disabled may not be recognised by those around them as having other identities too.

Disabled women may also feel that they are not welcomed in women's organisations or events. Then in a vicious circle which reinforces their otherness, this perpetuates the exclusion of their perspectives from the conversations these other women are having. Because they are invisible the fact that their perspectives are missing is not noticed.

Lack of Laws adressing Sexual Violence and Disabled Women

emmaalinelaing — 2025-03-01 18:53:27 UTC

Women with disabilities may be at greater risk of sexual violence due to other factors such as social isolation, limited sexual education, dependence on others, including for intimate hygiene, reduced physical defenses, and communication barriers that prevent disclosure of the abuse. When disabled women, particularly those with intellectual disabilities, are victims of sexual crimes, offenders tend to be regarded in a more lenient way when judgment is passed.

emmaalinelaing — 2025-03-01 18:57:34 UTC

Feminist disability studies emerged as a field of inquiry in the late 1980s, merging insights from the feminist movement and disability rights activism, with a focus on critiquing how disabled women were often excluded from both movements, highlighting the unique experiences of women with disabilities and the intersectional nature of oppression they faced; the term "feminist disability studies" was coined by scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson in the early 1990s, solidifying the field as a distinct area of study that analyzes the social construction of disability through a feminist lens.