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Disability and Female Body: Reflections of American Muslim Women with Disability
Abstract
This paper explores the experiences of American Muslim women with disability through the lens of feminist and cultural approaches. The paper examines the intersection of disability identity and gender relations in a transnational context in which dominant structures of culture operate as double oppression for women with disability. Disability as an identity is constructed through religious, cultural, and social meanings of normalcy and abled bodies. As Rosemarie Garland-Thompson, in her founding work Extraordinary Bodies regarding feminist disability studies, argued that social meanings defining both female and disabled body construct them as inferior, and this hierarchical categorization grounded in body can be explored by an examination of “politicizing the materiality of bodies” and “rewriting the category of woman” (21). While the arguments of feminist disability studies are grounded in power politics based on body, most of the current research and theory focus on the attributions to white female body as disabled and inferior. On the other hand, women from diverse backgrounds are underrepresented in the scholarship although they are also subjects of stigma due to their culture and experience of immigration. In this sense, drawing on feminist disability studies, this paper also integrates the body politics in relation to norms of normalcy and superiority or, deviance and inferiority with reference cultural categories and origins. In diaspora and transnational context, such normalcy can be a source of oppression, yet it also reproduces itself as a source of liberation. In this sense, based on narratives of first and second-generation Muslim women in Milwaukee, collected from people with Middle Eastern background through oral history techniques, this paper discusses a) disability as a social and cultural construct as a result of enforced normalcy based on body, b) women’s bodies seen as disabled, c) women’s experience as more complicated than men in case of an impairment or disease since they face a lot of hardship based on their gender. Women’s narratives reveal that disability, as a form of identity, is formed through the essentialization and standardization of physical aspects; and the body configuration discredits the subjectivity of identity.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
All Middle East
Sub Area
Gender/Women's Studies