Feminist Disability Theory

Disability Theory and Disability Studies

The field of disability studies was founded by a group of scholars, activists, and people with disabilities as part of the disability rights movement of the 1960s. Like participants in the civil rights movement and the women's movement in the United States, participants in the disability rights movement strive to protect the rights of all persons of varying abilities while questioning what it means to have a disability. Primary aims of this interdisciplinary field include, first, to challenge the idea that disability is a medical category and, second, to use the body as a site of critical analysis. Sociologists, in particular, have used this thinking to put the term disabled in a social, political, and economic context while grounding disability in the experiences of individual life experiences.

Those using disability theory as a lens of analysis often look at both a group of people whom some consider disabled and a broader social landscape that defines some as able and others as disabled. At their beginning, disability theory and disability studies, like feminist theory and gender studies, made the experiences of people with disabilities visible to those who might not otherwise recognize them. Such visibility was supposed to help scholars, activists, and policy makers get a more complete picture of the social world and trace how oppression and privilege operate in the lives of people who might be seen as disabled. Disability theory, then, includes an analysis of power dynamics. Within this school of thought, theorists investigate meanings of normalcy, what it might mean to be abnormal, and how these definitions change over time and across locations.

In sociology, disability studies and disability theory grew out of the investigation of stigmatized identities and the ways that social groups define both insiders and outsiders. Sociologists began questioning the role of social institutions such as the workforce, the media, the family, the educational system, and the medical industry in assigning and maintaining stigma; sociologists also considered how people's day-to-day interactions in schools, work, and families reinforced certain stereotypes of what it meant to be disabled or abled. Toward these ends, sociologists studied such topics as depression, obesity, and mental retardation. Other areas explored by some sociologists and literature scholars are the role of culture and language, especially when investigating the empirical example of the Deaf community. Instead of considering themselves disabled, members of the Deaf community argue that, because of their native language of American Sign Language (ASL) and shared culture, they are actually part of a linguistic minority in the context of a larger hearing society.

...