The current
situation for women living with disabilities in Australia
The content outlining the disadvantage
experienced by women with disabilities in Australia is taken from a paper
titled ‘Women With Disabilities Australia: Policy Paper: 'Assessing the
situation of women with disabilities in Australia: A human rights approach'-(July
2011)--written with extensive research and documentation by Women With
Disabilities Australia--the peak organisation for women with all types of
disabilities in Australia (wwda.org.au). http://www.wwda.org.au/snapshot.htm Both men and women with disabilities
face discrimination and a-sexualisation however; women with disabilities face particular disadvantages
in the areas of education, work and employment, family and reproductive rights,
health, violence and abuse. These are just some of the
facts:
-Women with
disabilities experience violence, particularly family violence and violence in
institutions, more often than disabled men;
-Gender-based violence, including domestic/family violence, sexual
assault/rape is a cause of disability in women;
-Women and girls with disabilities are often at greater risk than
disabled men, both within and outside the home, of violence, injury or abuse, neglect
or negligent treatment, maltreatment or exploitation;
-Women with
disabilities are more vulnerable as victims of crimes from both strangers and
people who are known to them, yet crimes against disabled women are often never
reported to law enforcement agencies;
-While disabled people are much more likely to live in poverty, women with
disabilities are likely to be poorer than men with disabilities;
-Women with
disabilities are still subjected to forced sterilizations within Australia
-Women with
disabilities are more likely to be sole parents, to be living on their own, or
in their parental family than disabled men;
-Women with
disabilities who are parents, or who seek to become parents, face barriers in
accessing adequate health care and other services for both themselves and their
child/ren.
Disability feminism 101
In light of these
depressing facts what can we do as feminists, to understand and mobilize around
these issues? We can start by ensuring events are assessable! We can understand
disability politics and disability feminism and fight the struggles from within
these political perspectives. Disability feminism at its core deals with issues
of the non-normative body/mind and how our experience of our disabilities are
socially mediated and constructed by power. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, a disability
feminist scholar and activist, writes about transforming feminist theory
through the inclusion of the experience of disability. She proclaims that
''disability
allows for a critique of the
intersections between the politics of appearance and the medicalization of
subjugated bodies/minds. Feminist disability theory’s radical critique hinges
on a broad understanding of disability as a pervasive cultural system that
stigmatizes certain kinds of bodily variations. At the same time, this system
has the potential to incite a critical politics. The informing premise of
feminist disability theory is that disability, like femaleness, is not a
natural state of corporeal inferiority, inadequacy, excess, or a stroke of
misfortune. Rather, disability is a culturally fabricated narrative of the
body, similar to what we understand as the fictions of race and gender. The
disability/ability system produces subjects by differentiating and marking
bodies. Although this comparison of bodies is ideological rather than biological,
it nevertheless penetrates into the formation of culture, legitimating an
unequal distribution of resources, status, and power within a biased social and
architectural environment. As such, disability has four aspects: first, it is a
system for interpreting and disciplining bodily variations; second, it is a
relationship between bodies and their environments; third, it is a set of
practices that produce both the able-bodied and the disabled; fourth, it is a
way of describing the inherent instability of the embodied self. The disability
system excludes the kinds of bodily forms, functions, impairments, changes, or
ambiguities that call into question our cultural fantasy of the body as a
neutral, compliant instrument of some transcendent will. A feminist disability
theory denaturalizes disability by unseating the dominant assumption that
disability is something that is wrong with someone. By this I mean, of course,
that it mobilizes feminism’s highly developed and complex critique of gender,
class, race, ethnicity, and sexuality as exclusionary and oppressive systems
rather than as the natural and appropriate order of things''.
Some of our
key struggles as women with disabilities are the opposite of those of
mainstream feminism
A-sexualization is one such issue--to be seen as sexual beings, we want to
have this choice, to cruise across the dance floor and do the pash, in short to
be looked at and desired as a sexual object/being! Mainstream feminism
fights against the objectification of women’s bodies, disability feminism
fights to be seen as sexy and desirable. Arising from this a-sexualisation is
difficulty in finding partners and having healthy relationships where we are
treated as equal and valued, free from emotional and physical abuse. Another
key issue is the right to become mothers if we so wish, as we are often
prevented through sterilization or being given the pill, (a common experience
for women with intellectual disabilities), or actively discouraged from having
children at all (Ball, 2004 cited in Newell, 2008, p. 80). If we have children
there is a risk they will be taken from us, with recent research showing that
over one third of children are removed from our care (Newell, 2008, p. 80).
Feminist writer Jenny Morris writes:
‘Most people who we are interacting with including our lovers, are not like
us--they don’t have a disability. It is therefore very difficult for us to
recognise and challenge the values and judgments that are applied to us and our
lives. Our ideas about disability and ourselves are generally informed by those
who are not disabled’ (Morris, 1991, p.37). It takes courage to go out in
public when we repeatedly encounter rejection and revulsion towards our
non-normative bodies, are asked questions, such as ‘‘what’s
wrong with
you?’’ which exemplify an unequal power relationship and embody assumptions
about our lives, and when ‘the very physical environment tells us that we don’t
belong.
The affects of oppression
‘Once oppression has been internalized, little force is needed to keep us
submissive’ as we continually inflict the pain of our oppression back upon
ourselves (Campbell, 2009, p.16). The mental health effects of living in a
disabling society have been found to place us at ‘double the risk of devolving
a substance abuse problem or psychiatric disorder due to increased stress’ compared
to the general population (Turner, Lloyd, & Taylor, 2006, p.221). The high
rates of domestic violence and abuse women with disabilities are subject to
leaves us at a greater risk of developing PTSD, depression, anxiety or other
forms of mental illness, subsequent disabilities which further compound our
disadvantage.
What can we do as feminists?
‘One of the reasons the situation for people with
disabilities has been so slow to change is precisely because they are
positioned as the ‘other’ in our culture. To change such terrain requires all
of us to undertake a great deal of listening, talking and communication in so
many ways in order to imagine disability differently and to change something
that moves often only very imperceptibly-our culture itself. To embark on this
journey, and proceed with it when it becomes difficult, we cannot avoid seeking
answers to some important questions: why are we so concerned with defining and
enforcing normalcy? What is at stake for all of us in confronting the frailties
of our bodies, minds and lives?
(Goggin & Newell 2005, p.200). How can we as feminists resist normative
constructions of bodies/minds and find ways to subvert and challenge
them?
Extracts from above from:
Thomas, C, 2004, Disability and Impairment in
Swain, J, French, S, Barns, C & Thomas, C, (eds), 2004, Disabling
Barriers-Enabling Environments, (2end ed.), Sage Publications,
London.
Goggin, G & Newell, C, 2005, Disability
in Australia: Exposing a Social Apartheid, University of New South Wales
Press, Kensigton.
Garland-Thomson, R, 2006,
Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory in Davis, L, (ed) 2006, The Disabilities Studies Reader (2end ed.)
Morris, J, 1991, Pride Against Prejudice: Transforming Attitudes to Disability, The
Women’s Press, London.
