Disabled women's issues, experiences, and embodiments have been misunderstood, if not largely ignored, by feminist as well as mainstream disability theorists. The reason for this, I argue, is embedded in the use of materialist and constructivist approaches to bodies that do not recognize the interaction between “sex” and “gender” and “impairment” and “disability” as material-semiotic. Until an interactionist paradigm is taken up, we will not be able to uncover fully the intersection between sexist and ableist biases that form disabled women's (...) oppressions. Relying on the understanding that sexuality is one such material-semiotic phenomenon, I examine the operation of interwoven biases in two disabled women's narratives. (shrink)

Disability theory privileges masculinist notions of presence, visibility, material “reality,” and identity as “given.” One effect of this has been the erasure of “sensibility,” which, it is argued, inscribes, materializes, and performs the critique of binary thought. Therefore, sensibility must be re-articulated in order to escape the “necessary error” of identity implicit in accounts of cultural diversity, and to dialogue across difference in ways that dislocate disability from its position of disvalue in feminist thought.

This paper engages with theories of the monstrous maternal in feminist philosophy to explore how examples of visual art practice by Susan Hiller, Marc Quinn, Alison Lapper, Tracey Emin, and Cindy Sherman disrupt maternal ideals in visual culture through differently imagined body schema. By examining instances of the pregnant body represented in relation to maternal subjectivity, disability, abortion, and “prosthetic” pregnancy, it asks whether the “monstrous” can offer different kinds of figurations of the maternal that acknowledge the agency and potential (...) power of the pregnant subject. (shrink)

This article begins by wondering how the writer’s transformation into motherhood affects her practice of reading, writing and research: how maternities are made academic. Specifically, this article is interested in thinking through lactating breasts, as a particularly complex and potentially subversive ‘performance’ of maternity. In addition, this article reframes ‘maternal thinking’ through 1990s theories of embodiment and corporeality, and asks how embodied practices like breastfeeding might be theorized, as well as how ‘embodied theory’ might be practised. In looking at various (...) cultural texts about breasts and breastfeeding, the article is scripted into a series of connective and reflexive scenes around performance, space, language and knowledge, coming to rest in the imaginative project of an epistemology of breasts. It sets reflexive accounts of lived experience alongside theoretical reflections to create a dynamic and thoughtful reading of breasts, entwining personal and public discourses, maternal and academic writing, theorizing and cultural practices. (shrink)

Conflicts between bioethicists and disability theorists often arise over the permissibility of euthanasia and physician assisted suicide. Where mainstream bioethicists propose universalist guidelines that will direct action across a range of effectively disembodied situations, and take for granted that moral agency requires autonomy, feminist bioethicists demand a contextualisation of the circumstances under which moral decision making is conducted, and stress a more relational view of autonomy that does not require strict standards of independent agency. Nonetheless, neither traditional nor feminist perspectives (...) have fully engaged with the critique of disabled people that they are consistently subjected to discriminatory, even life-threatening, practice and policy in biomedical and health care. The paper revisits some of the issues that drive the often highly polarised debate between bioethicists and disability theorists around the question of end of life decisions involving disabled people. While many bioethicists have doubtless been indifferent to the difference that disability makes, I am also concerned that the very proper demand of disability activists and theorists to scrutinise all end of life decisions for signs of discrimination and even violence has segued into something damagingly restrictive that silences internal dissension and stifles external debate. Given that euthanasia and physician assisted suicide may be issues where conventional argument on either side will founder on deeply felt convictions, I make the radical move to speculate on an entirely different, quasi-Deleuzian, approach to the value of life in order to shake up entrenched positions, and begin to think differently. (shrink)