Women, disability and feminism-thinking across Global North and

Women, disability and feminism-thinking across Global North and Global South

contexts. Dr Rebecca Lawthom, Reader in Community Practice, Manchester Metropolitan University

Talk pivots around 4 things • The importance of place to disability • The importance of place to gender • The importance of gender and contribution of feminism to disability thinking • The possibility of disability thinking and feminism converging

Disability and place • The knowledge and data we have about disability differs across different countries and contexts. • Global North contexts, disability theorists within the disability movement are often advocating for rights in places where welfare and neoliberalism co-exist. • Global North contexts import knowledge into South- power of disability language

Disability defined and imposed • The charity model: disabled people are to be pitied and helped through handouts • Who has the power to define? • Where do these definitions emerge from? • Global North or ‘developed’ countries active makers of meaning around definitions and aid/help • The social model: disability is a function of a disabling society- but whose definition?

Disability lingo exported • Grech (2010) points out construct is Western, meaning depends upon hybrid socio-cultural, political, religious/spiritual and historical contexts in which disability is placed • “the meaning of impairment must be understood in terms of cosmology and values and purposes of social life’ (Whyte and Ingstad, 1995:10) • ‘we can deal scientifically and practically with disability only if we are sensitive to the cultural, social and psychological structures in which it is embedded. Every culture poses a challenge to preconceived notions and forces us to ask anew how disability is understood, conceptualised and

How does Disability and place relate and matter? • 10% of global population disabled (c.650 million people)- expected to rise to 800 million by 2015 (Peters et al, 2008) • Currently 150 million of these are children (Grech, 2008) and estimated that 365 million of world’s working age population are disabled (Disabled World, 2009) • Place matters: 88% live in the world’s poorest countries and 90% of those in rural areas (Marks 1999a) • Ghai (2002) points out that India has a 1 billion population and approximately 70 million are disabled

How and why does gender matter? • In most of the OECD countries females have higher rates of disability than males. • Whilst there are more disabled people in the Southern hemisphere (Stone 1999) the picture lacks a gender focus (c.f. Ghai, 2002) • Whatever the focus we know that having a disability places an individual in the world’s largest minority group - in an already crowded theatre of multi-culturalism (Davis 1995)

Disability, gender and geography • Gazing upon women less than 3% of impairment is acquired congenitally meaning that rest is acquired through health and violence (domestic, war and conflict) • Position of women in different contexts further marginalised by development programmes, health prevention, sexual ignorance, access to education and representation

What can a profoundly feminist lens offer to this global issue? • I propose some problems, resources and theoretical mappings which allow a rather different positioning of girls and women • A need to unpack disability and disablement (challenging ableism) • Shift the focus away from purely structural and minority world understandings of disability

Gender and feminism added to disability studies • If disability studies is a transdisciplinary space (Goodley, 2010) a need to explore how disability, race, sexuality and gender intersect? • Feminism has engaged with class and race (why?) but rather less so with disability (exceptions here are Morris, 1996: Ghai, 2002, 2006) • Place is also key here and ‘Global North/ Metropole/minority world’ thinking has given way to other postcolonial voices - ‘Global South/Majority world’

Positioning disabled women • • • •

Meekosha (2004) notes that disabled women are: More likely to be poor than disabled men Less likely to access rehabilitation and employment More likely to experience public space as threatening • More likely to live in parental home and experience sexual abuse • More likely to remain in abusive relationships due to reliance on partners for support and child custody (Olkin, 2003)

Problem 1: Gender blind, asexual assumptions • Assumed asexuality of disabled people, particularly women and even more so those with learning difficulties • Little provision for sex education and services for antenatal care (Cheung, 2009) • Roets et al 2009 write of wo/men with learning difficulties’ to give readers options to read the terms inclusively as well as exclusively

Problem 2: ‘care’ and disabled mothers • Prilleltensky (2004) disabled mothers face discrimination and prejudice during their antenatal care • Booth and Booth (2002) find parents with learning difficulties over scrutinised and under-supported • Theorists voice the real concern that children of disabled mothers are taken away from them • Notions of ‘care’ here problematized as interdependence - this sits uneasily with care and disabled people. Disabled people’ cannot be independent)

Problem 3: un/easy set of relationships between feminist agenda and disability studies • Goodley (2010) notes that non-disabled feminist have called for freedom of termination rights and been concerned with subjugation of women into caring role • Paradoxically disability and feminism have shared an over reliance on bodies constructed as mad, bad and ill - where women’s bodies categorised through PMT, hysteria, depression and Munchausen's syndrome by proxy

The possibility of enmeshing feminism and critical disability studies • Thompson (2005) notes that disability studies and feminism merge around 3 key practices: retrievals, reimaginings and rethinkings • Retrievals involves finding women’s writings that have the power for ‘narrative recuperation’ • Reimaginings strives to rewrite oppressive social scripts • Rethinkings opens disabled feminists to other theories such as phenomenological, postructuralism etc

Rethinking: raced gendered bodies • Disabling and colonising practices have historically had similar outcomes • Disability is compounded by nationhood and colonialism • Estimates that 113 primary school children are not attending school. In India 23 million (Gabel and Chandler), Africa 80 million (Ngcobo and Mehuskriska, 2008) • Women and children who are disabled are denied equal access to education- literacy rate of under 5% (DPI)

Rethinking requires • Understanding and seeing liminality (the failure to fit social categories) • Queering settings and practices • Seeing relationality (especially in the Global South) as very different • Miles (2006) critiques the transplanting of ideas from the ‘metropole’ around ‘rights’, ‘independence’ and individualism

A more urgent set of concerns • Ghai (2006) notes 35 million women in India who suffer discrimination and familial rejection • Property structures are patriarchal in nature and disability often viewed as a curse (dowry traditions) • Up to 10 million girls may have been terminated due to gender selection • Girls cost more than boys(colonialist agenda brings consequences) • Disabled people cost more than non-disabled in this context

Retrievals- different narratives • ‘I am not just an ‘impairment’, nor a label, nor just a woman, nor simply an activist. I am also all of these but never for long. I am cyber-babe, theory chick, unsettled and unsettling’ from Goodley and Roets, 2008

Titchkosky’s recuperative narratives • Disability here presented as implicit interactions which can challenge and locate disability as a cultural phenomenon- the experience of between-ness’. • She reminds us to ‘watch our watchings, read our readings’ • She also advocates that we listen to stories ‘ as that is all we are’ • Critical feminist open up possibilities for exploring new ways of doing theory, ways that use embodiment as a theoretical resource for a corporeal epistemology (Roets et al 2008: 102-103)

Towards a culturally sensitive disability studies: Interconnections of disability studies in and across Malaysia and UK • www.rihsc.mmu.ac.uk/malaysiaukdisabil ity • A strand exploring indigenous knowledges and ways in which care need cultural understanding • Care and kinship require indigenous knowledge

Re-imaginings • Writing back is a key tenet of postcolonial theory and decolonising methodologies (Tuhiwai Smith, 1999) • Goodley (2010) notes that ‘writing back invites subjugated voices to re-enter cultural and political critique’ citing the spoof website of the Institute for the study of the neurologically typical (http:/isnt.autistics.org)

The 3 Rs in developing a critical feminist disability studies • Reimaginings • Retrievals • Rethinkings • In UK 3Rs associated with education but we need also to change the world • The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it