Disability, gender and the trajectories of power

Abstract

Disabled women (for example, Morris 1991, 1996; Sheldon 2004; Vernon 1997, 1999) have for a long time been arguing that, since its inception, the disabled people’s movement has overlooked the particular experiences of disabled women. In addition, disabled women have also expressed general dissatisfaction towards the feminist movement (for example, Begum 1992; Morris 1996), resulting in disabled women feeling marginalised from both movements. Morris (1993, 1998) argues that the issues which are of particular relevance to disabled women have often been excluded to the extent that women seem invisible within the disability movement. Similarly, Vernon (1997, 1999) writes that the disabled people’s movement often ignores certain challenges met by disabled women in particular, such as the fact that disabled women are subject to patriarchal oppression and that they are very often targets of sexual discrimination. Morris (1996) further writes that if disabled women’s issues are given any attention at all, they are only tagged as a special interest or an optional extra with the result that even today, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, there are still very few separate books and articles that solely focus on the issues of disability and womanhood.