Unspeakable Offenses: Untangling Race and Disability in Discourses of Intersectionality

The Literature of Critical Race Feminist Theory approaches disability as an expression of intersectional identity wherein devalued social characteristics compound stigma resulting in so-called spirit murder. Three diverging practices of intersectionality are identified as guiding scholarship on the constitutive features of multiply minoritizing identities: (1) anticategorical frameworks that insist on race, class, and gender as social constructs/fictions; (2) intracategorical frameworks that critique merely additive approaches to differences as layered stigmas; and (3) constitutive frameworks that describe the structural conditions within which social categories in the above models are constructed by (and intermeshed with) each other in specific historical contexts. In being true to Critical Race Feminist Theory approaches, the article draws on two other narratives, one historical and one contemporary, to describe how individuals located perilously at the intersections of race, class, gender, and disability are constituted as non-citizens and (no)bodies by the very social institutions (legal, educational, and rehabilitational) that are designed to protect, nurture, and empower them.