Southern Bodies and Disability: re-thinking concepts

Abstract Re-making disability studies from the global South requires a major reconsideration of concepts. Southern perspectives are emerging across the social sciences and humanities, and are now an important resource for disability studies. Impairment has to be understood in the context of the violence of colonisation and neocolonial power. The global dynamics of capitalist accumulation, and of hierarchical gender relations, change the material character and meaning of disability. Global society has to be understood as embodied, and social embodiment as a reality-forming (ontoformative) process, not a system-maintaining one. The intellectual, cultural and social resources of colonised and postcolonial societies provide vital resources for disability politics.