Disability

Gender and Disability as Social Experiences

Three famous Canadian examples illustrate how disability and gender intersect to create a distinct social experience: activist mothers, Tracy Latimer, and Leilani Muir.

During the 1970s, grassroots groups of disability activists formed coalitions and founded legal advocacy centers to advance important changes in disability policy that established rights of access to education, employment, health services, transportation, and public space. These activists found allies in parent-led disability organizations, including the March of Dimes and Associations for Community Living and Mental Health. The reference to “parent” obscures the gendered nature of the role: mothers led the way when advocacy for their own disabled children brought them into a broader political struggle for social justice and equality. Activist mothers were not feminists seeking equality with men or a challenge to patriarchy; they acted out of a sense of gendered obligation as wives and mothers. In trying to raise their children, they encountered a cultural ethos of ableism and discrimination, and their sense of power-lessness politicized them.

In 1993, Robert Latimer, a farmer in Wilkie, Saskatchewan, put his young daughter Tracy in a truck and piped poisonous carbon monoxide from the vehicle's exhaust into the cab. Tracy died. Because she had a physical and mental disability, her father defended his actions as a mercy killing, an act of kindness committed out of love. Latimer received a conviction of murder and was imprisoned, but thousands of people signed a petition urging leniency and calling for a reduced sentence. As discussed later, Tracy's death at the hands of a family member who believed he was being merciful reflects broader experiences of gender, violence, and disability.

In 1996, a Canadian legal decision on the sterilization of Leilani Muir brought to light the damaging legacy of the Sexual Sterilization Act of the Alberta Government. Muir discovered in 1989 at the age of 25 that she could never have children because she had been sexually sterilized at 14 on the orders of the Alberta Eugenics Board. The doctors kept the nature of the surgery from Muir; they told her only that her appendix was removed. After years of futile attempts to correct the surgery, she began legal action that culminated in a court awarding her $740,000 for wrongful sterilization. The medicalizing and intrusive response to Muir's disability is emblematic of a long history of eugenic sterilization.

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