Female Forms
1st Edition
Published on 1. August 1999
189 pages
978-0-335-23296-3 (ISBN)
Description
This book explores and develops ideas about disability, engaging with important debates in disability studies about what disability is and how to theorize it. It also examines the interface between disability studies, women's studies and medical sociology, and offers an accessible review of contemporary debates and theoretical approaches.
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Content
- Front cover
- Half title
- Series editor
- Title page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Contents
- Series editor's preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Understanding disability
- The structure of the book and the argument
- Experiencing disability: disabled women's narratives
- Key terms
- Notes
- Part I: Defining disability
- Chapter 1 Defining disability: the social model
- Introduction
- Political roots
- Social barriers
- Disabled women constrained by social barriers
- The emergence of critiques of the social model
- Gender
- Endings
- Notes
- Chapter 2 Defining disability: a definition riddle
- Introduction
- A medical sociologist on disability
- Susan Wendell's definitional approach
- The challenge
- The definitional riddle
- The social relational and the property definitions of disability
- Conflation
- Easy target
- Impairment effects
- Endings: back to a social relational definition of disability
- Notes
- Chapter 3 Disability and the social self
- Introduction
- Broadening the social relational definition of disability: beyond 'doing'
- Barriers on the outside, inside
- Experiencing the psycho-emotional dimenstions of disablism
- Recent debates in Disability Studies: the cultural
- Constructionism, idealism and materialism
- Endings
- Notes
- Part II: Female forms
- Chapter 4 Disability and feminist perspectives: the personal and the political
- Introduction
- Excluded by our sisters
- The significance of telling one's story and of 'writing the self'
- Challenging the status quo
- Disabled feminists
- The counter-critique
- The place of the personal
- The epistemological importance of 'experience'
- Endings
- Notes
- Chapter 5 Disability and gender
- Introduction
- Gendered disablism
- Making sense of oppressions
- Endings
- Notes
- Chapter 6 Wherein lies the difference?
- Introduction
- Feminisms
- Disability, impairment and difference
- Constructed difference?
- Identity
- Reflecting on the debates about difference
- What about identity?
- Endings
- Notes
- Part III: Understanding Disability
- Chapter 7 Theorizing disability and impairment
- Introduction
- Disability and impairment
- Historical materialism
- The death of the grand narratives: postmodernism
- Endings: ways forward?
- Notes
- Chapter 8 Disability Studies and medical sociology
- Introduction
- The divide
- Conceptualizing disability
- Understanding experience
- Doing disability research
- Endings: ways forward?
- Notes
- References
- Index
- Back cover
