By Devon White
I recently came across this article written by Wheelchair Dancer. In it, she describes a conversation she overheard between a man and a woman. The man is trying to describe a game of bridge to his female companion. Not anything to raise one’s eyebrows about, right? Until the woman starts to describe herself as “slow” and “dyslexic” as an explanation of why she couldn’t grasp the intricacies of the game. As the writer points out, the woman is using self-proclaimed “disabilities” to make it okay for her to be inferior to the man in this instance.
This article was a good tipping point into this topic, but here are some more blog posts that delve into the role feminism plays in the lives of women living with actual disabilities. How do you think we can best integrate disability into the feminist discourse?