Women With Disabilities

Women with disabilities are women first, sharing the dreams and disappointments common to women in a male-dominated society. But because society persists in viewing disability as an emblem of passivity and incompetence, disabled women occupy a devalued status in the social hierarchy. This book represents the intersection of the feminist and disability rights perspectives; it analyzes the forces that push disabled women towards the margins of social life, and it considers the resources that enable these women to resist the stereotype. Drawing on law, social science, folklore, literature, psychoanalytic theory, and political activism, this book describes the experience of women with disabilities. The essays consider the impact of social class, race, the age at which disability occurs, and sexual orientation on the disabled woman's self esteem as well as on her life options. The contributors focus their inquiry on the self perceptions of disabled women and ask: From what sources do these women draw positive self images? How do they resist the culture's power to label them as deviant? The essays describe the ways in which disabled women face discrimination in the workplace and the failure of the mainstream women's movement to address their concerns. In the series Health, Society, and Policy, edited by Sheryl Ruzek and Irving Kenneth Zola.

Women with disabilities often have difficulty accessing health care services, and the quality of the health care they do receive is often worse than the care received by women without disabilities and men with disabilities. The consequences of these disparities include increased prevalence of secondary complications, diminished quality of life, and even premature death. In this book, researchers from a range of disciplines, with expertise in a range of disabilities, investigate the causes and consequences of these health care disparities and offer plans for action to improve wellness, health promotion, and disease prevention among this broad yet consistently underserved population. Using an integrated care framework as a foundation, authors tackle the structural, environmental, and social barriers that prevent women with disabilities from accessing effective and culturally-competent care and services, and address related issues including psychosocial health, interpersonal violence, health care policy, health promotion, disease prevention programs, and telehealth, as well as reproductive and sexual health, and dental care.

Drawing on rich empirical work emerging from core conflict regions within the island nation of Sri Lanka, this book illustrates the critical role that women with disabilities play in post-armed conflict rebuilding and development. This pathbreaking book shows the critical role that women with disabilities play in post-armed conflict rebuilding and development. Through offering a rare yet important insight into the processes of gendered-disability advocacy activation within the post-conflict environment, it provides a unique counter narrative to the powerful images, symbols and discourses that too frequently perpetuate disabled women’s so-called need for paternalistic forms of care. Rather than being the mere recipients of aid and help, the narratives of women with disabilities reveal the generative praxis of social solidarity and cohesion, progressed via their nascent collective practices of gendered-disability advocacy. It will be of interest to academics and students working in the fields of disability studies, gender studies, post-conflict studies, peace studies and social work.

Het boek belicht verschillende facetten van de maatschappelijke positie van gehandicapte vrouwen in ontwikkelingslanden : de dubbele discriminatie als vrouw en als gehandicapte, de stigmatisering tengevolge van de bestaande vooroordelen ten aanzien van gehandicapten. De auteur bekijkt tevens de positieve rol van preventieve en rehabilitatieprogramma's, en van opvoeding en arbeid. Een aantal van deze innovatieve projecten worden in het boek beschreven.

The first critical study of personal narrative by women with disabilities, Unruly Bodies examines how contemporary writers use life writing to challenge cultural stereotypes about disability, gender, embodiment, and identity. Combining the analyses of disability and feminist theories, Susannah Mintz discusses the work of eight American autobiographers: Nancy Mairs, Lucy Grealy, Georgina Kleege, Connie Panzarino, Eli Clare, Anne Finger, Denise Sherer Jacobson, and May Sarton. Mintz shows that by refusing inspirational rhetoric or triumph-over-adversity narrative patterns, these authors insist on their disabilities as a core--but not diminishing--aspect of identity. They offer candid portrayals of shame and painful medical procedures, struggles for the right to work or to parent, the inventive joys of disabled sex, the support and the hostility of family, and the losses and rewards of aging. Mintz demonstrates how these unconventional stories challenge feminist idealizations of independence and self-control and expand the parameters of what counts as a life worthy of both narration and political activism. Unruly Bodies also suggests that atypical life stories can redefine the relation between embodiment and identity generally.

"This important and ground-breaking collection brings together the diverse voices of women with various disabilities, both physical and mental. Here, Canadian women speak frankly about the societal barriers they encounter in their everyday lives due to social attitudes and physical and systemic inaccessibility. They bring to light the discrimination they experience through sexism, because they are women, and through ableism, because they have disabilities. For them, the personal is definitely political. While society traditionally views having a disability as "weakness" and that women are the "weaker" sex, this collection points to the strength, persistence, and resilience of disabled women living the edges."--Pub. desc.

Around the world, people living with disabilities face barriers in the built environment, in employment and education, and in social attitudes and policies that can make it hard to live a full and satisfying life. The ten women we meet in this book face physical and mental health challenges, some from birth and some who became disabled later in life. But they all share the determination to make the world a better place, not just for themselves but for those who will come after them. Their fields are as diverse as elite sport, neurosurgery, architecture, and environmental activism, and while some have devoted themselves to disability policy, others prefer to lead by example. In either case they have proved themselves to be unstoppable.