Feminist research on community care and ‘informal carers’ identified this as a women's issue but failed to address the interests and experiences of older and disabled women – those who received ‘care’ One consequence is that such feminist research has implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, undermined disabled women's rights to a home, children and personal relationships. Using qualitative research, the article highlights the actual experience of women whose physical impairment means that they need help with daily living activities, looking at the (...) different circumstances in which such help is received. The disability movement's concept of ‘independent living’ raises particular issues for disabled women. ‘Independent living’ is about having choice and control over the assistance needed, rather than necessarily doing everything for yourself. However, gender inequalities may also inhibit the choice and control that women have in their lives. Assistance can be given within a personal relationship as an expression of love, but disabled women may also experience abusive, restrictive or exploitative relationships. Public services do not generally provide assistance in a way which enables a woman to have choice and control in her life, or even to carry out child-caring or homemaking tasks. The research on the various ways of receiving personal assistance found that those women who were able to purchase their own help were most likely to be living independently, in the sense of exerting choice and control in their lives. Feminist research can help to create a space for disabled women's absent voices, and add to the pressure for change in the way that personal assistance needs are met. This is a human and civil rights issue which has a key impact on the control that disabled women have over their lives. (shrink)

Ever since feminist theory introduced the distinction between sex and gender, the question of what it means to be a woman has preoccupied feminist thought. In ____Gender__ ____Trouble ____ Judith Butler questions whether it is possible to "be" a woman at all or, for that matter, any gender.

One of the most talked-about scholarly works of the past fifty years, Judith Butler’s _Gender Trouble_ is as celebrated as it is controversial. Arguing that traditional feminism is wrong to look to a natural, 'essential' notion of the female, or indeed of sex or gender, Butler starts by questioning the category 'woman' and continues in this vein with examinations of 'the masculine' and 'the feminine'. Best known however, but also most often misinterpreted, is Butler's concept of gender as a reiterated (...) social _performance _rather than the expression of a prior reality. Thrilling and provocative, few other academic works have roused passions to the same extent. (shrink)

Drawing on postmodernist analyses, Leaky Bodies and Boundaries presents a feminist investigation into the marginalization of women within western discourse that denies both female moral agency and bodylines. With reference to contemporary and historical issues in biomedicine, the book argues that the boundaries of both the subject and the body are no longer secure. The aim is both to valorize women and to suggest that "leakiness" may be the very ground for a postmodern feminist ethic. The contribution made by Margrit (...) Shildrick is to go beyond modernist feminisms to radically displace the mechanisms by which women are devalued. The anxiety that postmodernism cannot yield an ethics, nor advance feminist concerns is addressed. (shrink)

Feminist social theory and female body experience are the twin themes of Iris Marion Young's twelve outstanding essays written over the past decade and brought together here. Her contributions to social theory raise critical questions about women and citizenship, the relations of capitalism and women's oppression, and the differences between a feminist theory that emphasizes women's difference and one that assumes a gender-neutral humanity. Loosely following a phenomenological method of description, Young's essays on female embodiment discuss female movement, pregnancy, clothing, (...) and the breasted body. In an introduction that situates her work in the context of shifts in feminist theory and politics over the past decade, Young emphasizes the rootedness of her theorizing in a dedicated and seasoned political activism. (shrink)

A critical analysis of Diana Fuss's Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference and Elizabeth Grosz's Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists.