Feminism and Disability

This article has its roots in a series of seminars on Researching Physical Disability, funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. As a feminist I should have felt a sense of unity with other feminist researchers attending the seminars and there certainly were occasions when a sense of sisterly solidarity prevailed against the way that some of the male participants operated. As a disabled woman, however, I felt a deep sense of alienation from the nondisabled feminists present and anger that there seemed to be an assumption that they were 'on the same side' as me. This alienation and anger comes from the failure of feminism to integrate the concerns of disabled women into its theory, methodology, research and politics. My sense of alienation also extends to Feminist Review for, looking at my copies of back issues of this journal, the only reference to disability is a book review which I myself wrote in 1989. (Nasa Begum's article Disabled Women and the FeministAgenda, was published in FR40 after this article was written.) My confidence that this is an appropriate forum for this article falters. Yet I believe that feminism itself is the poorer for its failure to address the concerns of disabled women. Coming at it from another angle, I also believe that feminist theory and methodology has a major contribution to make to disability research. The alienation and anger that I feel stem from two characteristics of feminism: firstly, the way in which disability is generally invisible in terms of feminism's mainstream agenda; secondly, the way in which, when disability is a subject for research by feminists, the researchers fail to take on the subjective reality of disabled people, instead objectifying us so that the research is alienated from our experience.