Capacitisme and validisme are two proposed translations, in the francophone world, of the concept of ableism. This concept arises in the 1970s and 1980s in the United States, in the wake of the disability studies and feminist movements, in order to designate a hierarchical dichotomy between abled and disabled people as well as an system of oppression. This paper proposes to follow the theoretical developments and the activist mobilizations around the notions of capacitisme and validisme, which both appeared at the (...) beginning of the 2000s. Capacitisme appears initially in the Canadian context and in the disabled feminist movements. The gender analogy and the intersectional perspective structure these concepts. While seldom appearing in the activist world, it shows up as an operational concept in some empirical research. Validisme was created, developed and gained importance through the French activist space. It echoes previous work that established the relationship between disability and work/productivity. It has recently emerged in public debate, appearing in the media and dictionaries, but is the subject of little mobilization and theorization in academic research, particularly in empirical studies. (shrink)

In the summer and autumn of 2015, I met with activists in Athens and Thessaloniki, with the aim of collaboratively producing a conceptual mapping of LGBTQ social movement discourses. My point of entry was the use and signification of “racism” in LGBTQ discourses (and more generally in common parlance in Greek) as a superordinate or “umbrella” concept that includes “homophobic” and “transphobic” but also “misogynist,” “ageist,” “ableist,” and class- or status-based prejudice, discrimination, and oppression, in addition to that, of course, (...) based on “race” or “ethnicity.” As a political theorist whose work over the past decade has focused on the concept of intersectionality, its origins in US Black feminist thought, and its transnational travel beyond the Anglo-American context in which it originated, I wanted to examine how this use of “racism” relates to the concept of “intersectionality” which is now emergent in the Greek social movement context, in particular in LGBTQ and feminist discourses, yet which has not been engaged by academics, neither in the nascent and struggling field of gender studies, nor in legal theory. How do LGBTQ activists define the referential scope and semantic contents of these concepts, based on what knowledges grounded in lived experiences, and on what kinds of social movement strategies? How do these concepts and their theoretical underpinnings reflect or direct activists’ political resistance to the widespread violence that they identify within and on the borders of Greek society? Do they enable coalition-building with other minoritised groups targeted by institutional and interpersonal “racism”? In approaching these questions, I wanted to trace the ways in which my interlocutors produce theories, through which social conditions of racial and heteropatriarchal power are made visible, are explained, and are contested—conditions that they identify with the institutions—“nation, religion, and family”—that make up what they termed the “triptych” or the “syntax of power.” What emerged in my conversations with activists were vivid accounts of the atmospheric violence facing LGBTQ people in Greece, its institutional and interpersonal manifestations, both banal and extreme. Indeed, many activists defined violence as the quintessence of oppression as such, and as what links various systems or forms of oppression—or, “racisms”—to one another. In what follows, I draw on these conversations not to answer the questions with which I set out, but, primarily, those that my interlocutors generated, which concern, ultimately, the unlivability of queer and trans lives—the violence LGBTQ people face and resist, particularly at the intersections of youth, poverty, disability, rurality, racialisation, criminalisation, and patriarchy. (shrink)

This paper builds on prior critical scholarship on Agriculture 4.0—an umbrella term to reference the utilization of robotics and automation, AI, remote sensing, big data, and the like in agriculture—especially the literature focusing on issues relating to equity and social sustainability. Critical agrifood scholarship has spent considerable energy interrogating who gets what, how decisions get made, and who counts as a “stakeholder” in the context of decision making, questions relating to distributive justice, procedural justice, and representative justice, respectively. Less attention, (...) however, has been paid in this literature to the subject of recognition justice. Recognition justice asks the question, “Who are subjects of justice?” That query, however, is easily to oversimplify. As subjectivity is neither monolithic nor fixed, implied in these discussions are deeper questions having to do with the characteristics of one’s subjectivity that deserve moral recognition. This act of translation, from justice-in-theory to justice-in-practice, also complicates the evaluation of whether Agriculture 4.0 platforms are just, or not. These recognition justice tensions are explored by leveraging qualitative data collected through forty-two face-to-face interviews with individuals on farms located in the US states of Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, and Wyoming who utilize these platforms. The study design intentionally oversampled for persons with disabilities, which highlights another distinguishing characteristic of the paper relative to critical Agriculture 4.0 scholarship. In addition to exposing certain ableist assumptions in these discussions, the sampling technique proved invaluable for interrogating how we think about labor, work, and leisure in agriculture. The paper specifically discusses how Agriculture 4.0, for example, shapes conceptions of what it means to be “able to work,” “willing to work,” “hard working,” etc. (shrink)

_The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability_ is a revolutionary collection encompassing the most innovative and insurgent work in philosophy of disability. Edited and anthologized by disabled philosopher Shelley Lynn Tremain, this book challenges how disability has historically been represented and understood in philosophy: it critically undermines the detrimental assumptions that various subfields of philosophy produce; resists the institutionalized ableism of academia to which these assumptions contribute; and boldly articulates new anti-ableist, anti-sexist, anti-racist, queer, anti-capitalist, anti-carceral, and decolonial insights and (...) perspectives that counter these assumptions. -/- This rebellious and groundbreaking book's chapters–most of which have been written by disabled philosophers–are wide-ranging in scope and invite a broad readership. The chapters underscore the eugenic impetus at the heart of bioethics; talk back to the whiteness of work on philosophy and disability with which philosophy of disability is often conflated; and elaborate phenomenological, poststructuralist, and materialist approaches to a variety of phenomena. Topics addressed in the book include: ableism and speciesism; disability, race, and algorithms; race, disability, and reproductive technologies; disability and music; disabled and trans identities and emotions; the apparatus of addiction; and disability, race, and risk. With cutting-edge analyses and engaging prose, the authors of this guide contest the assumptions of Western disability studies through the lens of African philosophy of disability and the developing framework of crip Filipino philosophy; articulate the political and conceptual limits of common constructions of inclusion and accessibility; and foreground the practices of epistemic injustice that neurominoritized people routinely confront in philosophy and society more broadly. -/- A crucial guide to oppositional thinking from an international, intersectional, and inclusive collection of philosophers, this book will advance the emerging field of philosophy of disability and serve as an antidote to the historical exclusion of disabled philosophers from the discipline and profession of philosophy. -/- The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability is essential reading for faculty and students in philosophy, disability studies, political theory, Africana studies, Latinx studies, women's and gender studies, LGBTQ studies, and cultural studies, as well as activists, cultural workers, policymakers, and everyone else concerned with matters of social justice. (shrink)

This paper questions the connection between vaginas and feminist embodiment in The Vagina Monologues and considers how the text both challenges and reinscribes systems of patriarchy, compulsory heterosexuality, and ableism. I use the Intersex Society of North America's critique as a point of departure and argue that the text offers theorists and activists in feminist, queer, and disability communities an opportunity to understand how power operates in both dominant discourses that degrade vaginas and strategies of feminist resistance that seek to (...) reclaim and celebrate them. (shrink)

Some authors in disability studies have identified limits of both the medical and social models of disability. They have developed an alternative model, which I call the ‘composite model of disability’, to theorise societies’ ableist norms and structures along with the subjective/phenomenological experience of disability. This model maintains that ableist oppression is not the only source of suffering for disabled people: impairment can be as well. From a feminist, queer, trans activist, anti-ableist perspective and using an intersectional, autoethnographic methodology, I (...) apply this composite model of disability to trans identities to consider the potentially ‘debilitating’ aspects of transness. I argue that transness, like disability, has too often been perceived from two perspectives, medical or social, without the benefit of a third option. From a medical perspective, transness is reduced to an individual pathology curable with hormonal/surgical treatments, a conceptualisation that erases structural oppression. From a social point of view, transness is conceptualised as a neutral condition and variation in sex/gender identity. In this model, structural oppression (transphobia/cisgenderism) is seen as the only cause of ‘trans suffering’. I argue that, just as the medical and social models of disability provide limited opportunities for reflection on the complex experience of disability, medical and social understandings of transness, respectively, are insufficient to describe the complexity of trans experience. I explore the possibilities presented by the application of a composite model of disability in trans studies. By both problematising cisgenderist oppression and acknowledging trans people's subjective experiences of suffering through some of the debilitating aspects of transness, this composite model avoids the pitfalls of the medical and social models. The application of tools from disability studies to trans issues uncovers cisnormativity in disability movements and denounces ableism in trans movements. This will, I hope, solidify alliances between these communities and fields of study. (shrink)

The emerging field of eco-ability draws attention to important connections between the injustices faced by people with disabilities and the injustices faced by non-human animals and the rest of the natural world (Nocella et al. 2012). Recognizing the common roots of different forms of injustice can be illuminating and unifying, creating powerful allies in the quest for a just society. At the same time, Anthony Nocella rightly cautions that one should be careful not to exaggerate commonalities, intersections, and analogies between (...) different forms of oppression (2015). To overstate connections between different forms of discrimination risks misrepresenting that discrimination, thereby perpetuating it or at least failing to address it adequately. This cautiousness about analogizing oppressions is all the more important for eco-activists who exist within a privileged position in civil society. The potential for eco-ability studies to build lasting coalitions hinges on scholars’ ability to strike the right balance between drawing connections and acknowledging differences in a thoughtful way. In this paper, I explore some of the connections and differences between ableism, speciesism and ecocide by focusing on two oft-cited themes: reason and normalcy. My hope in doing so is to illuminate some of the more compelling connections that can move us forward on the path toward a more just world. (shrink)

This paper examines five groups of women that were instrumental in the emergence of the category of “feeblemindedness” in the United States. It analyzes the dynamics of oppression and power relations in the following five groups of women: “feebleminded” women, institutional caregivers, mothers, researchers, and reformists. Ultimately, I argue that a feminist analysis of the history of mental retardation is necessary to serve as a guide for future feminist work on cognitive disability.

This article examines how disabled women relate to activism in Japan. It analyses the impact of the disability right movement on their life courses. The first part presents the history of disabled women’s activism, which emerged in the early 1970s, its internationalization and disabled women’s connections with feminist movements. Then, by examining the life paths of disabled female activists, this paper shows how they dealt with the specific constraints and obstacles they encountered in the areas of independent living, marriage and (...) motherhood. It then questions some contemporary aspects of activism that may be detrimental to disabled women, and presents initiatives aimed at eliminating some of their specific problems. (shrink)

Critical theorists should turn to disability as an important category of intersectional analysis. I demonstrate this through one type of critical theory—namely, feminism. Disability intersects with all vectors of identity, since disability affects people of all races, ethnicities, religions, genders, sexualities, and classes. Gender and sexuality are particularly illustrative because disability is configured in ways that map onto negative images of femininity. Additionally, the ways in which feminist and disability scholars undertake analysis are complementary. And because these two fields (...) are inherently interdisciplinary, dialogue between them can yield a richer notion of intersectionality within intersectionality. (shrink)

Although feminist philosophers have been critical of the gendered norms contained within the history of philosophy, they have not extended this critical analysis to norms concerning disability. In the history of Western philosophy, disability has often functioned as a metaphor for something that has gone awry. This trope, according to which disability is something that has gone wrong, is amply criticized within Disability Studies, though not within the tradition of philosophy itself or even within feminist philosophy. In this paper, I (...) use one instance of this disability metaphor, contained within a passage from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, in order to show that paying attention to disability and disability theory can enable identification of ableist assumptions within the tradition of philosophy and can also open up new interpretations of canonical texts. On my reading, whereas Hegel’s expressed views of disability are dismissive, his logic and its treatment of contingency offer up useful ways to situate and re-evaluate disability as part of the concept of humanity. Disability can in fact be useful to Hegel, especially in the context of his valorization of experiences of disruption and disorientation. Broadening our understanding of the possible ways that the philosophical tradition has conceived human beings allows us to better draw on its theoretical resources. (shrink)

[This piece is written for those working in communication studies and in healthcare writ large, with the aim of bringing insights from disability studies and philosophy of disability to bear on discussion concerning disability in those fields.] Despite being assailed for decades by disability activists and disability studies scholars spanning the humanities and social sciences, the medical model of disability—which conceptualizes disability as an individual tragedy or misfortune due to genetic or environmental insult—still today structures many cases of patient–practitioner communication. (...) Synthesizing and recasting work done across critical disability studies and philosophy of disability, I argue that the reason the medical model of disability remains so gallingly entrenched is due to what I call the “ableist conflation” of disability with pain and suffering. In an effort to better equip healthcare practitioners and those invested in health communication to challenge disability stigma, discrimination, and oppression, I lay out the logic of the ableist conflation and interrogate examples of its use. I argue that insofar as the semiosis of pain and suffering is structured by the lived experience of unwelcome bodily transition or variation, experiences of pain inform the ableist conflation by preemptively tying such variability and its attendant disequilibrium to disability. I conclude by discussing how philosophy of disability and critical disability studies might better inform health communication concerning disability, offering a number of conceptual distinctions toward that end. (shrink)

Intersectionality has been adopted as the preferred term to refer to and to analyze multiple axes of oppression in feminist theory. However, less research examines if this term, and the political analyses it carries, has been adopted by women’s rights organizations in various contexts and to what effect. Drawing on interviews with activists working in a variety of women’s rights organizations in France and Canada, I show that intersectionality is only one of the repertoires that a women’s rights organization might (...) use to analyze the social experience and the political interests of women situated at the intersection of several axes of domination. I propose a typology of four repertoires that activists use to reflect on intersectionality and inclusiveness. Drawing on a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the interview data, I show that hegemonic repertoires about racial or religious identity in one national context shape the way activists and organizations understand intersectionality and its challenges. The identity of organizations, as well as their main function, also shape their understanding of intersectional issues. (shrink)

What does feminist disability studies contribute to feminist methods? Feminist disability scholars interweave life-writing about their experiences of disability or caring for a disabled person to challenge ableist stereotypes. As such, they foreground their own vulnerability to build disability identity and community. This style of life-writing, while essential, tends to calcify the dichotomy between the disabled and abled—a binary that the field of feminist disability studies aims to destabilise. Building on new work in feminist disability studies, I show how some (...) scholars use life-writing to cultivate an estranging sensitivity. This new sensitivity builds on prior feminist disability studies scholarship to estrange us from 1) the idea that disability is a cohesive identity and community, 2) that disability is always a socially desirable position, and 3) that allegiance to disability rights insulates us from ableist anxiety. By embracing the tension between solidifying and destabilising the meaning of disability, feminist disability scholars can leverage life-writing as a tool of resistance and thereby lessen the threat of conformity that life narratives tend to produce. (shrink)

Intersectionality is a travelling theory; now enjoying significant contemporary visibility and popularity in the feminist blogosphere, it has moved across disciplines and borders in ways that are quite distinct from the scholarly critique developed by Kimberlé Crenshaw some time ago. In this article, I consider how intersectionality is translated, and retheorised, as an intertwined set of everyday knowledges and associated governmental practices that both echo and diverge from some of the complexities and politics of its wide-ranging scholarly uptake. Drawing on (...) interviews with self-identifying feminists in a pilot project mapping contemporary Australian digital feminisms, this article explores two overarching patterns in intersectionality’s mobilisation. First, the shift to understanding intersectionality as an everyday conceptual grid plotting women’s differences along one axis, and measuring relative privilege and disadvantage on the other, recentring whiteness and liberal multicultural models of diversity and inclusion. Second, the transformation of intersectionality into an abstract, individualistic model of conduct, involving the citation and classification of ‘white feminist’ behaviour elsewhere, in frequent judgments on US celebrity culture. As such, intersectionality, while seemingly popular, often remained curiously ‘theoretical’ and divorced from embodied, everyday practices. I suggest in what follows that such a model of intersectionality raises questions of the commercial, racialised, political and mediated conditions that shape the theory’s visibility and materialisation. (shrink)

An increasing number of scholars at the intersection of feminist philosophy and critical disability studies have turned to Merleau-Ponty to develop phenomenologies of disability or of what, following Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, I call "non-normate" embodiment. These studies buck the historical trend of philosophers employing disability as an example of deficiency or harm, a mere litmus test for normative theories, or an umbrella term for aphenotypical bodily variation. While a Merleau-Pontian-inspired phenomenology is a promising starting point for thinking about embodied experiences of (...) all sorts, I here draw a cautionary tale about how ableist assumptions can easily undermine accounts of non-normate experience. I first argue that the omission or misguided treatment of disability within the history of philosophy in general and the phenomenological tradition in particular is due to the inheritance of what I call “the ableist conflation” of disability with pain, suffering, and disadvantage. I then show that Merleau-Ponty’s famous reading of the blind man’s cane is problematic insofar as it omits the social dimensions of disabled experiences, misconstrues the radicality of blindness as a world-creating disability, and operates via an able-bodied simulation that confuses object annexation or extension with incorporation. In closing, I contend that if phenomenology is to overcome the errors of traditional philosophy, as Merleau-Ponty once hoped, it must heed the insights of “crip” or non-normate phenomenology, which takes the lived experience of disability as its point of departure. [French translation forthcoming in Pour une phénoménologie critique, ed. Donald A. Landes, Quebec City, Les Presses de l'Université Laval/Paris, J.Vrin]. (shrink)

Black feminist theory and theorizations by feminists of colour have identified and explored emotions linked to race and racism in feminist movements, especially in the US context. Building on this literature, this article explores the changes in feminist emotional dynamics linked to race which have been brought up by the relatively recent adoption of intersectionality in feminist movements’ discourses in two European countries, France and Switzerland, which are both often described as ‘colour-blind’ contexts. Drawing on Hochschild’s concept of feeling rules, (...) we argue that intersectionality has changed the ways feminists are legitimately expected to feel about race and racism within feminist movements in both contexts. As feeling rules vary according to the members’ positions within the movement, we contend that these changes in emotional dynamics contribute to redefine feminists’ relations and feminist membership along racial lines. Based on interviews with young feminist activists in France and Switzerland during mobilization processes characterized by a prominent use of intersectionality, we observe how intersectionality discourses bring about new feeling rules in relation to race and racism. These feeling rules differ for white and non-white feminists: while intersectionality has led young white feminists to self-education and self-critique, racialized feminists often expressed mixed feelings about intersectionality and its use, in particular by white feminists. Importantly, these changes in feeling rules have allowed racialized feminists to renegotiate their relations with white feminists and their emotional content, as well as their position within the movement. (shrink)

Although laws have been passed to promote disability inclusion in French workplaces, many companies face challenges complying with the required quota of disabled workers. Workplace ableism hinders the implementation of disability laws. To move from apathy to increased compliance, insider activists took proactive action, uncovered ableist practices, and mobilized colleagues at different levels. In this article, I study how some disability rights activists managed to obtain positions as disability managers in their companies in the late 2000s, gaining the ability to (...) design inclusive policies for their organizations. Using ethnographic interviews, I explore how they use their own identities to address ableism, mobilize colleagues to promote the inclusion of disabled workers, and empower disabled employees to obtain accommodation. This study sheds light on the individual, relational, and structural work necessary to move from anti-ableist laws to a concrete and recoupled implementation in the workplace. This also explains why companies offer positions to activists to develop blueprints for compliance. Activists’ work was recognized because regulations were ambiguous but created financial sanctions for non-compliance; ableist cultures created distrust among disabled workers; and organizations needed activists’ extra work to design programs, build expertise, and develop tools to promote inclusion. (shrink)

Disability, like questions of race, gender, and class, is one of the most provocative topics among theorists and philosophers today. This volume, situated at the intersection of feminist theory and disability studies, addresses questions about the nature of embodiment, the meaning of disability, the impact of public policy on those who have been labeled disabled, and how we define the norms of mental and physical ability. The essays here bridge the gap between theory and activism by illuminating structures of power (...) and showing how historical and cultural perceptions of the human body have been informed by and contributed to the oppression of women and disabled people. (shrink)

Perceptions of the American South as being no place for a feminist continue to affect and inform decisions about research and activism in the region. By taking a closer look at Memphis and the American South, and by questioning longstanding assumptions, stereotypes, and omissions about the region, we create additional opportunities for further discussion about the complexities of feminism, intersectionality, and place. I challenge two common assumptions about the South. The first is the assumption that southern feminists are rare, (...) or nonexistent, and have had little influence on developing feminist perspectives or pursuing social activism as local initiatives. The second assumption involves the concept of the Problem South and the propensity of scholars, journalists, and activists to fall back on old ideas about southern exceptionalism, and to emphasize continuities between the Old South and New South while minimizing discontinuities. In challenging these assumptions, I review the significance of intersectionality and suggest that paying attention to region and place offers an additional level of complexity and explanatory power for understanding social phenomena, including gender, sexualities, and social movements, as well as southern feminism and the Problem South. (shrink)

Transnational Feminist Itineraries demonstrates the key contributions of transnational feminist theory and practice to analyzing and contesting contemporary political and economic trends, including growing authoritarian nationalism and the extension of global corporate power.

This article examines the rise of a feminist engagement with the disability rights movement. Three realms of social being—individual, society, and the state—interact in the making of the identities of disability. The emergence of Women With Disabilities Australia, suggests the ways women with disabilities come to identify with an autonomous women's group and the ways in which the particular forms of our activisms are produced.

This article discusses different conceptions and translations of the devadasi system in transnational Dalit feminist activism. I focus specifically on activist participation at the 1994 Asia Tribunal on Women’s Human Rights in Tokyo, Japan and the construction of an analogy between the experiences and struggles of devadasis and that of ‘military comfort women’, i.e. women from Japan’s former colonies who were abducted and raped by the Japanese military during World War II. I argue that strategic claims of commonality are part (...) of the process of making specific, local practices legible to a global audience and that these sorts of claims also enable transnational feminist activism and solidarity. (shrink)

Contemporary feminisms are ineluctably drawn into comparisons with historic discourses, forms of praxis and tactical repertoires. While this can underscore points of continuity and commonality in ongoing struggles, it can also result in nostalgia for a more unified and purposeful feminist politics. Kate Eichhorn argues that our interest in nostalgia should be to understand feminist temporalities, and in particular the specific context in which we experience such nostalgia. Accordingly, this article takes up the idea that neoliberalism and populism, which have (...) given rise to both neoliberal feminism and femonationalism, have produced a series of contestations regarding the purpose and nature of feminist politics, as expressed by white popular feminism in the United Kingdom. This article examines two dimensions of feminist nostalgia: first, nostalgia for a more radical form of feminist politics – one not co-opted by neoliberal forces, not individualistic and not centred around online activism; and second, a nostalgia for the idea of ‘sisterhood’ – a time before white feminists were called upon to engage with intersectionality or be inclusive of trans-women. We analyse these themes through analysis of white popular feminism produced in the United Kingdom between 2010 and 2020, cautioning against a feminist nostalgia which neglects to engage with the radical politics of intersectionality. (shrink)

Appeals to intersectionality serve to remind us that social categories like race and gender cannot be adequately understood independently from each other. But what, exactly, is the intersectional thesis a thesis about? Answers to this question are remarkably diverse. Intersectionality is variously understood as a claim about the nature of social kinds, oppression, or experience ; about the limits of antidiscrimination law or identity politics ; or about the importance of fuzzy sets, multifactor analysis, or causal modeling in social science.

How have and how might philosophers contribute to linking disability and activism in these peri-COVID-19 times, especially in forms of public engagement that go beyond podcasted talks and articles aimed at a public audience? How do we harness philosophical thinking to contribute positively to those living with disability whose vulnerabilities are heightened by this pandemic and the ableism highlighted by collective responses to it?

The Turkish-language release of Hanne Blank's Virgin: The Untouched History is a politically engaged translation aimed at disrupting Turkey's heteropatriarchal virginity codes. In Virgin Crossing Borders, Emek Ergun maps how she crafted her rendering of the text and draws on her experience and the book's impact to investigate the interventionist power of feminist translation. Ergun's comparative framework reveals translation's potential to facilitate cross-border flows of feminist theories, empower feminist interventions, connect feminist activists across differences and divides, and forge transnational feminist (...) solidarities. As she considers hopeful and woeful pictures of border crossings, Ergun invites readers to revise their views of translation's role in transnational feminism and examine their own potential as ethically and politically responsible agents willing to search for new meanings. Sophisticated and compelling, Virgin Crossing Borders reveals translation's vital role in exchanges of feminist theories, stories, and knowledge. (shrink)

Informed consent is a central concept for empirical and theoretical research concerning pregnancy management decisions and is often taken to be one of the more fundamental goals of the profession of genetic counseling. Tellingly, this concept has been seen by disability communities as salutary, despite longstanding critiques made by disability activists, advocates, and scholars concerning practices involved in genetic counseling more generally. In this chapter, we show that the widespread faith in informed consent is misleading and can be detrimental to (...) the practice of genetic counseling as guided by concerns of justice and equity. We proceed in two steps. First, we explain how informed consent is flawed as a practical concept. Second, we show how the inadequacy of informed consent illuminates the animating core of disability critiques of genetic counseling: the issue of ableism. We argue that the problem of ableism cannot be solved with informed consent because it is not merely a problem of information, but also of epistemic schemas. We suggest that what we call critically informed consent is better suited to move genetic counseling from being aware of the problem of ableism to becoming actively anti-ableist. (shrink)

Feminists have indicated the inadequacies of bioethical debates about human embryonic stem cell research, which have for the most part revolved around concerns about the moral status of the human embryo. Feminists have argued, for instance, that inquiry concerning the ethics and politics of human embryonic stem cell research should consider the relations of social power in which the research is embedded. My argument is that this feminist work on stem cells is itself inadequate, however, insofar as it has not (...) incorporated an analysis of disability into its considerations of the ethical and political issues that surround the phenomena. Thus, I consider claims that disability theorists and anti-disability activists have made about the research. I conclude by indicating that stem cell research must be situated within a cultural matrix that operates in the service of normalisation. (shrink)

Disabled women's issues, experiences, and embodiments have been misunderstood, if not largely ignored, by feminist as well as mainstream disability theorists. The reason for this, I argue, is embedded in the use of materialist and constructivist approaches to bodies that do not recognize the interaction between “sex” and “gender” and “impairment” and “disability” as material-semiotic. Until an interactionist paradigm is taken up, we will not be able to uncover fully the intersection between sexist and ableist biases that form disabled women's (...) oppressions. Relying on the understanding that sexuality is one such material-semiotic phenomenon, I examine the operation of interwoven biases in two disabled women's narratives. (shrink)

This article investigates the relationship between feminism and conscientious objection in Israel, evaluating the efficacy of feminist resistance in the organised refusal movement. While recent feminist scholarship on peace, anti-occupation and anti-militarism activism in Israel largely highlights women's collective action, it does so at the risk of eliding the relations of power within these groups. Expanding the scope of consideration, I look to the experiences of individual feminist conscientious objectors who make visible significant tensions through their accounts of military (...) refusal and participation in the organised conscientious objection movement. Drawing on original ethnographic research, this article problematises feminist activism in the organised Israeli refusal movement through three primary issues: political voice; privilege; and the realisation of gender agendas. Using Michel Foucault's conceptualisation of power as it has been critiqued and qualified by feminist scholars, I consider the ways in which resistance may be both multiple and a diagnostic of power, allowing activists and academics not only to envision new avenues for social change, but also to recognise their constraints. Critically, feminist theories of intersectionality enrich and complicate this Foucauldian approach to power, providing further modes of critique and strategy in the context of feminist activism in Israel. Ultimately, I argue not only for engagement with the limits of power, but also attention to their function, as in theory and praxis these boundaries critically inform our theorising on gender and resistance. (shrink)

This article explores the concept of the “scholar as activist” in the context of postcolonial feminist film practice, and the successes and shortcomings of a research design conceptualised to explore the potential that self-reflexive filmmaking offers to articulate the narratives of South African Hindu women (and other suppressed groups). My point of departure was a strong sense of the misrecognition of my own identity as a South African Hindu woman of Indian descent, in stereotypical representations of Hindu women in mainstream (...) film. South African Hindu women, and suppressed groups by extension, have stories that need to be told. The question emerged of how such stories could be told through the medium of film. Could the interface between the medium of self-reflexive film, the academic filmmaker and the narratives of South African Hindu women translate into meaningful social action that would offer a platform for resistance to mainstream (mis)representations? A critical reflection on my initial filmmaking process, and an analysis of the film text itself, illustrated that as an academic with various platforms of expression at my disposal, I had assumed a superficial similarity to and yet privileged position over those whose story I attempted to tell. How then could women use self-reflexive filmmaking to tell their own stories that resist limited mainstream gendered representations and reclaim their own identities? In a play between an academic register and an overtly self-reflexive narrative style, I thus explicate the organic process of developing a revised methodological approach for the postcolonial “scholar as activist”. (shrink)

... explores the limitations of the transnationalist approach to feminism and questions the neoliberal emphasis on individual freedom and consumer choice as the central goals of feminist activism.... All chapters proceed from the belief in the continued usefulness of intersectionality as a valuable category of critical analysis that is particularly necessary at the time when the effects of neoliberal globalization are undermining many familiar categories of critical inquiry.

Higher education institutions are legally bound to provide equal educational opportunities for diverse learners, traditionally materialized as individualized accommodations. This paper contends that despite the growing interest and scholarship in implementing more inclusive pedagogy enabling access to education for all students, those efforts still fall short of systematically addressing intersecting, oppressive, and anti-ableist practices in the classrooms. I argue, that in order to develop a truly inclusive, equitable, socially just and transformative pedagogy and teaching practices, we need a theory that (...) posits disability in the context of learning and development, the theory that integrates disability into human development in a manner that overcomes dichotomized and reductionist perspectives of disability and individualistic notions of learning. Drawing on my research on teaching and institutional practices for a student diagnosed with autism, analyzed through the lens of Critical Disability Studies in conjunction with Vygotsky’s theory of defectology and recent advances in cultural-historical activity theory, especially the Transformative Activist Stance, this paper offers steps toward integrating these approaches into a transformative pedagogy framework for inclusive, equitable, and anti-ableist pedagogy for all learners. (shrink)

Ableism refers to the discrimination of disabled people. How does it impact individuals who also suffer from sexism? Intersectionality theories posit that social identities mutually constitute, reinforce, and naturalize one another. Inspired by a ‘Marginalized in Marginalized lens,’ this paper adopts an intercategorical approach to intersectionality and applies it to study the intersection of disability and gender. We show how using the Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition can contribute to empirically quantify the penalty associated with intersectionality. We apply our proposed measure to study (...) the intersection of disability and gender in the labor market in China. Our main result is to show that, compared to other groups, disabled women have the lowest yearly labor earnings and that this situation results from them suffering a penalty from being both disabled and women that is larger than the sum of disadvantages from disability and from gender. This penalty is present along the income distribution and particularly important at the bottom of the income distribution except among top earners, suggesting a survival bias. Furthermore, we also document how much of this extra penalty is driven by an endowment effect (such as differences in educational attainment) and how much of it is driven by a price effect (suggestive of discrimination). Regarding the occupational profile of different groups, we find that disabled women are over-represented in necessity self-employment and that they face a glass ceiling to access mid-level managerial jobs, while disabled men face a glass ceiling to access top-level managerial jobs. We conclude discussing the need to take gender into account in research on ableism as well as in the design of corporate and public policy. (shrink)

This book develops an intersectional feminist approach to moral responsibility. It accomplisheses four main goals. First, it outlines a concise list of the main principles of intersectional feminism. Second, it uses these principles to critique prevailing philosophical theories of moral responsibility. Third, it offers an account of moral responsibility that is compatible with the ethos of intersectional feminism. And fourth, it uses intersectional feminist principles to critique culturally normative responsibility practices. -/- This is the first book to provide (...) an explicitly intersectional feminist approach to moral responsibility. After identifying the five principles central to intersectional feminism, the author demonstrates how influential theories of responsibility are incompatible with these principles. She argues that a normatively adequate theory of blame should not be preoccupied with the agency or traits of wrongdoers; it should instead underscore, and seek to ameliorate, oppression and adversity as experienced by the marginalized. Apt blame and praise, according to her intersectional feminist account, is both communicative and functionalist. The book concludes with an extensive discussion of culturally embedded responsibility practices, including asymmetrically structured conversations and gender- and racially biased social spaces. -/- An Intersectional Feminist Approach to Moral Responsibility presents a sophisticated and original philosophical account of moral responsibility. It will be of interest to philosophers working at the crossroads of moral responsibility, feminist philosophy, critical race theory, queer theory, critical disability studies, and intersectionality theory. (shrink)

The Routledge Companion to Intersectionalities is an outstanding reference source to the key contemporary analytic in feminist thought comprising over fifty chapters by a diverse, international and interdisciplinary team of contributors. The Companion is divided into nine clear parts: Retracing Intersectional Genealogies Intersectional Methods and (Inter)Disciplinarity Intersectionality's Travels Intersectional Borderwork Trans* Intersectionalities Disability and Intersectional Embodiment Intersectional Science and Data Studies Popular Culture at the Intersections Rethinking Intersectional Justice. Within these sections the key topics, debates, and applications are examined, including: (...) intersectional methods, trans intersectionality, transnational intersectionalities, intersectional pedagogies, digital intersectionalities, and intersectional science. This collection is essential reading for students and researchers working in Women's and Gender Studies, Feminism, Sociology, Politics and other related subjects from across the Humanities and Social Sciences. (shrink)

This article probes the philosophical and political significance of the relationships between wheelchair activists and their wheelchairs. Analyzing disability memoirs and the work of a professional wheelchair dancer, I argue that wheelers frequently experience complex relationality and queer kinships with their wheels. By bringing the artistry of disabled writers and dancers into conversation with the notions of human–material relations in the work of Donna Haraway, Jane Bennett, Stacy Alaimo, and Mel Chen, I show how alternative animacies shape wheelers’ conceptions of (...) interdependence and movement. The sensuous pleasure they take in their wheels queers conventional conceptions of how humans should relate to things. New materialist philosophy has increasingly drawn attention to the porous boundaries between the human and material world. But where posthumanist philosophers have largely aimed to dethrone the sovereignty of the human, disability activists use alternative animacies to raise up a devalued and discounted portion of humanity: to emphasize the agency and capacity of those whose lives are often cast as pitiable and powerless, to express a queer feminist disability culture and politics, and to claim the transgressive vitality and vibrant artistry of life with disability. (shrink)

Life Goes On (1989–1993) was the first television series in U.S. history not only to introduce a recurring teenaged HIV-positive character but also to feature an actor with Down syndrome in a leading role. Drawing new connections among disability studies, queer theory, and bioethics, I argue that Life responded to American disability rights activism and the AIDS epidemic of the early 1990s by depicting sex education as disability activism. By portraying fulfilling sexual relationships for its disabled protagonists, Life challenged heteronormative (...) and ableist underpinnings of marriage, sexuality, reproduction, and sex education and imagined transgressive queer/disabled alliances that often surpassed those of activists of its cultural moment. By representing homophobia, AIDS-phobia, and ableism as intertwined oppressions, the series conjured an expansive vision of sexual justice and pleasure, one that included and united teenagers, intellectually disabled people, and seropositive people—populations whose sexualities have generally been regarded as pathological or nonexistent. (shrink)

In recent decades, the intertwining ideas of self-determination and well-being have received tremendous support in bioethics. Discussions regarding self-determination, or autonomy, often focus on two dimensions—the capacity of the patient and the freedom from external coercion. The practice of obtaining informed consent, for example, has become a standard procedure in therapeutic and research medicine. On the surface, it appears that patients now have more opportunities to exercise their self-determination than ever. Nonetheless, discussions of patient autonomy in the bioethics literature, which (...) focus on individual patients making particular decisions, neglect the social structure within which health-care decisions are made. Looking through the lens of disability and informed by the feminist conception of relational autonomy, this essay argues that the issue of autonomy is much more complex than the individualist model suggests. The social system and the ableist ideology impose various forms of pressure or oppressive power that can affect people’s ability to choose according to their value system. Even if such powers are not directly coercive, they influence potential parents’ decisions indirectly—they structure their alternatives in such a way that certain options are never considered as viable and other decisions must be made. This paper argues that, instead of only focusing on the individual act of decision-making, we need to pay attention to the social structure that frames people’s decision. (shrink)

Disability has been a topic of heightened philosophical interest in the last 30 years. Disability theory has enriched a broad range of sub-specializations in philosophy. The call for papers for this issue welcomed papers addressing questions on normalcy, medical ethics, public health, philosophy of education, aesthetics, philosophy of sport, philosophy of religion, and theories of knowledge. This issue of Essays in Philosophy includes nine essays that approach the philosophy of disability in three distinct ways: The first set of three essays (...) provide a careful analysis of John Rawls, and the application of his work in ethics and justice to societies in which persons with disabilities, especially cognitive disabilities, can take active part in the processes of civil society. The second set of three essays branch out into continental philosophy, and are especially engaged with issues of community membership, communication, translation, and hermeneutics. The third set of three essays address disability specifically through the arts and aesthetics; asking questions on the portrayal of disabled persons in the arts and its implications for normalcy, sexuality, beauty, and the sublime. (shrink)

In the helpful article “Why Bioethics Needs a Disability Moral Psychology,” Joseph Stramondo adds to the critique of actually existing bioethics and explains why disability activists and scholars so often find fault with the arguments of bioethicists. He is careful not to stereotype either community—rightly, given that bioethicists endorse positions as disparate as utilitarianism, deontology, virtue ethics, and feminist ethics, among others. Although Stramondo never explicitly mentions utilitarians or liberals, it seems probable that these are the main targets of his (...) discontent. The disability community, as he concedes, is also a broad church. Yet for this reason, I do not believe that you can read off positions on bioethics questions from either disability embodiment or disability organization affiliation. (shrink)

Chronic illness is a major cause of disability, especially in women. Therefore, any adequate feminist understanding of disability must encompass chronic illnesses. I argue that there are important differences between healthy disabled and unhealthy disabled people that are likely to affect such issues as treatment of impairment in disability and feminist politics, accommodation of disability in activism and employment, identification of persons as disabled, disability pride, and prevention and “cure” of disabilities.

Introduction This article is a response to Zagouras, Ellick, and Aulisio who presented a case study justifying the questioning of the capacity and autonomy of a young woman with a physical disability who was pregnant and facing coercive pressure to terminate. Case description Julia is described as a 26-year-old woman with a neurological disability that requires her to receive assistance with activities of daily living. She was described as living with her parents who provided her with personal care assistance. Julia (...) became pregnant and her parents wished her to terminate because they did not want to care for her child in addition to her. In fact, Julia's parents threatened her with institutionalization if she did not elect to terminate the pregnancy. Her health care team questioned her decision-making capacity based on her alleged “mental age” and experiences of being sheltered and excluded. The health care team used directive tactics to convince Julia to terminate the pregnancy, which describe as both an ethical and feminist intervention. Discussion The current authors take issue with the case analysis provided by and argue that they neglected to account for numerous instances of systemic ableism that adversely affected Julia, demonstrated prejudicial and judgmental attitudes toward pregnancy and disability, inappropriately questioned her decision-making capacity by infantilizing her, misconstrued the feminist concept of relational autonomy, and colluded with coercive interference from family members. This is a classic example of discriminatory and culturally incompetent reproductive health care for a disabled woman. (shrink)

Drawing from contemporary blog data, this article examines an emerging project termed “neuroqueer.” Neuroqueer is a collaboration of activists, academics, and bloggers engaging in online community building. Neuroqueer requires those who engage in it to disidentify from both oppressive dominant and counterculture identities that perpetuate destructive medical model discourses of cure. It is a queer/crip response to discussions about gender, sexuality, and disability as pathology that works to deconstruct normative identity categories. Blog members employ neuroqueer practices to subversively combat exclusion (...) through rejection of able-hetero assimilation and counteridentification in favor of disidentification. Of particular interest for this special issue are the ways in which neuroqueer perspectives build more fluid conceptualizations of both gender and intersectionality through conscious disidentification from neurotypical norms and medical notions of cure on which they are often unconsciously based. (shrink)

This paper seeks to make “racism” strange, by exploring its invocation in the sociolinguistic context of LGBTQI+ activism in Greece, where it is used in ways that may be jarring to anglophone readers. In my ongoing research on the conceptualisation of interwoven oppressions in Greek social movement contexts, I have been interested in understanding how the widespread use of the term “racism” as a superordinate category to reference forms of oppression not only based on “race,” “ethnicity,” and “citizenship” (e.g., racism, (...) nationalism, xenophobia) but also those based on gender, gender identity, and sexuality (e.g., sexism, transphobia, and homophobia) relates to the increased adoption of “intersectionality” in movement discourses. In ordinary parlance, this commonplace usage of “racism” as an “umbrella term” nevertheless retains its etymological link to “race,” while its scope is extended to other regimes of superiority/inferiority or privilege/oppression. If intersectionality presupposes that oppressions are ontologically multiple and analytically separable, the use of “racism” as an umbrella concept seems to point in the other direction, implying that all forms of oppression originate from a common source, have a similar ontological basis, or generate privilege for the same social agents, who deploy similar tactics vis-à-vis oppressed groups. My research examines how intersectionality—widely understood as a multi-axial theory of oppression, which contends that power relations are multiple, distinct, and irreducible to one another, yet converge simultaneously in the experiences of multiply oppressed social groups—relates to the use of “racism” as a struggle concept in Greek, but also in other languages commonly used in Greece, such as Albanian (racizmi) and Arabic (eunsuria). In this paper, I examine how these two vocabularies—of racism and intersectionality—are operative in movement discourses, but also how they shape, and are shaped by activists’ perceptions, analyses, and theories of oppression. (shrink)

How do we theorize the experiences of caregivers abused by their children with autism without intensifying stigma toward disability? Eva Kittay emphasizes examples of extreme vulnerability to overturn myths of independence, but she ignores the possibility that dependents with disabilities may be vulnerable and aggressive. Instead, her work over-emphasizes caregivers' capabilities and the constancy of disabled dependents' vulnerability. I turn to Judith Butler's ethics and her conception of the self as opaque to rethink care amid conflict. Person-centered planning approaches, pioneered (...) by disability rights activists, merge Butler's analysis of opacity with Kittay's work on embodied care, while also inviting a broader network of people to both interpret needs and change communities. By expanding our conceptions of dependency, feminist disability studies can continue the aim of both Kittay and Butler: to humanize unintelligible lives. (shrink)