Toward a full-inclusion feminism: A feminist deployment of disability analysis

Feminist Studies

Volumn 31, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 34-63

  Rohrer, Judy ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 18944398710     PISSN: 00463663     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/20459006     Document Type: Review

References (88)

1. Most of my personal experience has been with people who have some form of physical disability. This is mirrored by an imbalance in the literature (and some would argue, the focus of the movement) toward physical disabilities. I have made an attempt to include perspectives from those with intellectual and sensory disabilities, but I recognize that the imbalance persists. I've taken the ephigraph from Simi Linton, Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 185.
2. Linton, Claiming Disability, 3
3. Joseph P. Shapiro, No Pity: People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights Movement (New York: Times Books, 1994), 323.
4. Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, U.S. Public Law 336, 2d session (July 26), sec. 2; sec. 3; sec. 2; 42 USC 12101; www.usdoj.gov/crt/ada.
5. Shapiro, No Pity, 4-6.
6. Lennard Davis offers an analysis of how the courts have revitalized Freudian notions of people with disabilities as narcissists demanding special rights and hiding their true laziness under a veneer of disability. In this frame, compliance is recast as generosity. Lennard J. Davis, Bending over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism, and Other Difficult Positions (New York: New York University Press, 2002).
7. The ADA has five titles that cover employment, state and local government services, provisions for private business, and telecommunication services. Title I covers employment and is the most litigated. The most notable victory was the 1999 Olmstead decision (119 S. Ct. 2176) in which the Supreme Court ruled against unnecessary institutionalization. That there are so few victories, however, see Ruth O'Brien, "The Supreme Court's Catch-22," Ragged Edge Online (February 2002), www.raggededgemagazine.com/extra/ obrienwilliams01802.htm.
8. For the unemployment rate, see Mary Johnson, "What's Happening to Our ADA?" Ragged Edge Online (March 2002), www.raggededgemagazine.com/0102/ 0102ft2.htm.
9. O'Brien, "The Supreme Court's Catch-22."
10. Harriet McBryde Johnson, "Reclaiming Our Civil Rights" (September/October 1999), Ragged Edge Online, www.raggededgemagazine.com/0999/ b0999ft1.htm.
11. Paul K. Longmore, quoted in Kenny Fries, Staring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside Out (New York: Plume Books, 1997), 9. Historically, the Deaf community has seen itself as a linguistic minority, culturally separate from the larger disabled community, hence the "Deaf and disabled" reference. Also, "Deaf is capitalized when referring to Deaf culture as opposed to "deaf," which references a sensory condition of not being able to hear.
12. Susan Wendell, "Toward a Feminist Theory of Disability," in The Disability Studies Reader, ed. Lennard J. Davis (New York: Routledge, 1997), 272.
13. Michael Oliver, Understanding Disability: From Theory to Practice (London: Macmillan Press, 1996), 35.
14. The debate over the social model and the social constructedness of disability versus more fluid postmodern conceptualizations of the body is more developed in the United Kingdom than in the United States. See Mairian Corker and Tom Shake-speare, eds., Disability/Postmodernity: Embodying Disability Theory (London: Continuum, 2002).
15. Linton, Claiming Disability, 2.
16. Peter Monaghan, "Pioneering Field of Disability Studies Challenges Established Approaches and Attitudes," Chronicle of Higher Education 44, no. 20 (1998).
17. Linton, Claiming Disability, 152-53.
18. Wendell, "Toward a Feminist Theory of Disability," 260-78;
19. Rosemarie Garland Thomson, "Feminist Theory, the Body, and the Disabled Figure," 279-94, both in Disability Studies Reader.
20. Davis, introduction to Disability Studies Reader, 1-2.
21. Some visually impaired theorists have pointed out the privileging of the visual over other sensory faculties and the frequent use of visual metaphors to indicate knowing or enlightenment.
22. Wendell, "Toward a Feminist Theory of Disability," 264.
23. Florence Howe and Marsha Saxton, eds., With Wings: An Anthology of Literature by and about Women with Disabilities (New York: Feminist Press, 1987), xi.
24. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, "Redrawing the Boundaries of Feminist Disability Studies," feminist Studies 20 (Fall 1994): 586.
25. Shelly Tremain, "On the Subject of Impairment," in Disability/Postmodernity, 44.
26. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1999), xvii-xviii.
27. Shapiro, No Pity, 7.
28. Nancy Mairs, Carnal Acts (New York: Harper Collins, 1990), 34.
29. Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick, "Bodies Together: Touch, Ethics, and Disability," in Disability Postmodernity, 62-75. Temporarily able-bodied, sometimes referred to as TAB, is a term coined by the disability rights movement.
30. Kathy E. Ferguson, personal communication, 7 Mar. 2003;
31. quote is from Ferguson's The Man Question: Visions of Subjectivity in Feminist Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 35.
32. Donna Haraway, "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s," Socialist Review 15 (March-April 1985): 65;
33. Ferguson, The Man Question, 30.
34. Wry Crips Disabled Women's Readers' Theater, "No Apologies" (unpublished script; Berkeley: Wry Crips Disabled Women's Readers' Theater, 1990).
35. Ruthann Robson, "Literary Ambition," in Restricted Access: Lesbians on Disability, ed. Susan Raffo (Seattle: Seal Press, 1999), 286.
36. Shapiro, No Pity, 213.
37. Ibid., 133.
38. Susan Wendell, The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability (New York: Routledge, 1996), 10, 151.
39. Joanna K. Weinberg, "Autonomy as a Different Voice: Women, Disabilities, and Decisions," in Women with Disabilities: Essays in Psychology, Culture, and Politics, ed. Adrienne Asch and Michelle Fine (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 273.
40. Margaret Lloyd, "The Politics of Disability and Feminism: Discord or Synthesis?" Sociology 35 (August 2001): 724.
41. Barbara Hillyer, Feminism and Disability (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), 18.
42. Diane Hugs, "I Don't Want It (#12)," in "No Apologies."
43. Mairs, Carnal Acts, 72.
44. Naomi Woronov, "A See-by-Logic Life," in With the Power of Each Breath: A Disabled Women's Anthology, ed. Susan E. Browne, Debra Connors, and Nanci Stern (Pittsburgh: Cleis Press, 1985), 174.
45. Susan Wendell, "Unhealthy Disabled: Treating Chronic Illnesses as Disabilities," Hypatia 16 (Fall 2001): 17-33.
46. For an excellent study on how women negotiate these choices in the workplace see Isabel Dyck, "Body Troubles: Women, the Workplace, and Negotiations of a Disabled Identity," in Mind and Body Spaces: Geographies of Illness, Impairment, and Disability, ed. Hester Parr (New York: Routledge, 1999), 119-37.
47. Cheryl Marie Wade, "I Am Not One of The," in Disability Studies Reader, 408.
48. Wade also uses irony in her performances, such as when she dresses in a white lab coat and mimics a doctor's litany of pathologizing categorizations of her body-an interaction in which she is supposed to be the silent object of scientific inquiry. See Sharon L. Snyder and David T. Mitchell, "Re-Engaging the Body: Disability Studies and the Resistance to Embodiment," Public Culture 13, no. 3 (2001): 384.
49. Garland-Thomson, "Feminist Theory, the Body, and the Disabled Figure," 285;
50. Eli Clare, Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation (Cambridge: South End Press, 1999), 114.
51. Since the publication of Exile and Pride, Clare has undergone a transgendered transition to living as a man. For research on gendered attributions of disability origin/cause (findings that include the notion that men are disabled because of external factors, whereas women are disabled because of something internal, usually disease), see Adrienne Asch and Michelle Fine, "Introduction: Beyond Pedestals," in Women with Disabilities, 1-37.
52. Wendell, "Toward a Feminist Theory of Disability," 267.
53. For an illuminating analysis of the construction of "normality" and its link to eugenics, see Davis, "Constructing Normalcy: The Bell Curve, the Novel, and the Invention of the Disabled Body in the Nineteenth Century," in Disability Studies Reader, 9-28.
54. Shapiro, No Pity, 237-88. The United States also has a history of pathologizing women who act outside of social norms, thereby constructing the "Crazy Lady" to justify using force against her.
55. Dan Sorensen, "Crime Victims with Disabilities" (paper presented at The Changing Face of Disability Law in the New Millennium Conference, University of California-Berkeley School of Law, 15 Mar. 2002).
56. Clare, Exile and Pride, 129.
57. Kimberlé Crenshaw, "Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color," Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991):1241-99;
58. Davis, Bending over Backwards, 145-57.
59. Wendy Chapkis, Beauty Secrets (Boston: South End Press, 1986), 16.
60. Barbara Rosenblum, "Living in an Unstable Body," in Staring Back, 103.
61. Mairs, Carnal Acts, 84.
62. Wade, "It Ain't Exactly Sexy," in The Ragged Edge: The Disability Experience from the Pages of the first Fifteen Years of the Disability Rag, ed. Barrett Shaw (Louisville, Ky.: Avocado Press, 1994), 88, 89.
63. Mairs, Carnal Acts, 96.
64. Jean Stewart, "From the Body's Memory," in With Wings, 136.
65. Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), 393.
66. Mary Duffy, "You Say Words That I Find Frightening," in the film Vital Signs: Crip Culture Talks Back, dirs. David T. Mitchell and Sharon Snyder (Marquette, Mich: Brace Yourselves Productions, 1997).
67. Linton, Claiming Disability, 138;
68. Wendell, The Rejected Body, 179.
69. Alexa Schriempf, "(Re)Fusing the Amputated Body: An Interactionist Bridge for Feminism and Disability," Hypatia 16 (Fall 2001): 60, 72;
70. Corker, "Sensing Disability," Hypatia 16 (Fall 2001): 34-52.
71. Victoria A. Brownworth, "Who Chooses? The Debate over Eugenics and Euthanasia," in Restricted Access, 140-41.
72. "Selective abortion" is a term coined by medical ethicist and disability scholar Adrienne Asch to refer to the aborting of an otherwise desired fetus based on prenatal test results that indicate the fetus may carry genetic "mutations" associated with disease or impairment.
73. Nadina LaSpina, quoted in Doris Zames Fleischer and Frieda Zames, The Disability Rights Movement: From Charity to Confrontation (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), 201.
74. Lisa Blumberg, "Eugenics and Reproductive Choice," in The Ragged Edge, 223.
75. Carol Gill, "The Last Sisters: Health Issues of Women with Disabilities," in Women's Health: Complexities and Differences, ed. Sheryl Burt Ruzek, Virginia L. Olsen, and Adele E. Clarke (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998), 102.
76. Erik Parens and Adrienne Asch, "The Disability Rights Critique of Prenatal Genetic Testing: Reflections and Recommendations," in Prenatal Testing and Disability Rights, ed. Erik Parens and Adrienne Asch (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2002), 9; 8.
77. Wendell, The Rejected Body, 156.
78. "Wrongful life" suits are brought on behalf of the person with a disability alleging the doctor had a duty to her/him to offer prenatal testing to her/his parents. "Wrongful birth" suits are those brought by the parents alleging such a duty. See Filar N. Ossorio, "Prenatal Genetic Testing and the Courts," in Prenatal Testing and Disability Rights, 308-33.
79. Harriet McBryde Johnson, "Should I Have Been Killed at Birth? The Case for My Life," New York Times Magazine, 16 Feb. 2003, 79.
80. Brownworth, "Who Chooses?" 137.
81. Shapiro, No Pity, 260.
82. Stewart, "From the Body's Memory," 134.
83. Shapiro, No Pity, 273. For more about a medical experiment in 1977 that sanctioned 24 deaths of babies with spina bifida, see
84. John R. Woodward, "It Can Happen Here," in The Ragged Edge, 230-35.
85. Wendell, The Rejected Body, 160;
86. McBryde Johnson, "Should I Have Been Killed at Birth?" 74.
87. Donna Haraway, "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective," Feminist Studies 14 (Fall 1988): 590.
88. Carol Thomas and Mairian Corker, "A Journey around the Social Model," in Disability Postmodernity, 21.