From the Guest Editors: Gender,Disability,and Intersectionality

Feminist Disability Studies Emerging and Arrived

Feminist disability studies has already been featured in several interdisciplinary feminist and/or women and gender and sexuality studies journals. In her influential feminist disability studies article published in Signs (2005), Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (2005) highlighted the deepening theoretical frameworks for understanding disability through feminist theory and, in turn, enriching feminist theory through the lens of disability. Eight years later, in an essay in American Quarterly, Garland-Thomson (2013) argued that disability studies is a field that is no longer emerging, but has already emerged. The increase in the number of special issues covering feminist disability studies attests to Garland’s proposition, including special issues in Hypatia (Hall 2012, 2015; Kittay, Silvers, and Wendell 2001, 2002) and Feminist Formations (formerly NWSA Journal) (Fritsch and McGuire 2018; Hall 2002). As Robert McRuer and Abbey Wilkerson noted, the special issue on disability studies in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies was one of the first to feature “the conjunction of queer and disabled theorizing” (2003, 16). The recent special issue of Feminist Formations on “Queer/Crip Contagions” (Fritsch and McGuire 2018) highlights the important contemporary scholarship in queer and crip theorizing that is the focus of Justine Egner’s article in this special issue. The field of black studies engaged with disability in the special issue of the African American Review, as contributors Moya Bailey and Izetta Autumn Mobley note in this issue. Calls for engagement with feminist studies also appear in multiple issues of Disability Studies Quarterly (e.g., Piepmeier, Cantrell, and Maggio 2014; Tremain 2013).

Feminist sociologists have engaged in this interdisciplinary field since at least the early 1990s (e.g., Rothman 1993; Sandelowski 1994); however, more sustained focus on feminist disability studies is a relatively recent phenomenon. A search for articles on the gendered experiences of disabled people yielded only a few results (e.g., Fannon 2012; Gerschick and Miller 1997; Hammer 2012). This search revealed that feminist scholarship on disability is not always found in the journals that specifically focus on gender; rather, feminist sociologists of disability often find their homes in disability, rehabilitation, or health-focused publishing venues. This may reflect the lack of engagement with critical disability studies by the larger field of sociology as well as the praxis of feminist disability studies scholars.

A disproportionate number of articles in the sociology of gender literature that addresses disability focus on the gendered roles expected of able-bodied mothers to rear children that adhere to strict standards of normalcy. This is often encouraged through the application of scientific or medical knowledge, which is especially apparent when the child has a disability (e.g., Green 2007; Landsman 2008; Litt 2004; Mauldin 2016; Rapp 2000; Rothman 1993; Scott 2010). A small subset of the publications do examine disabled women’s experiences of motherhood and/or pregnancy but rarely foregrounds the experiences of nonwhite mothers with disabilities (Dillaway and Lysack 2014; Frederick 2014, 2017; Thomas 1997). As is evident in the articles included in this special issue, as this literature matures, sociologists are now focusing on other identities, experiences and, social locations (in addition to analyses of parenting) and deepening theoretical engagement with intersectionality.

A review of articles previously published in Gender & Society produces similar results, in that most authors who offer substantive findings about disability have focused primarily on women’s efforts to care for young children who have been diagnosed with a disability (e.g., Blum 2007, 2015; Litt 2004). As we found with the wider literature search, women with disabilities who mother also were less represented in Gender & Society, with Angela Frederick’s (2017) article a rare exception. Other articles in the journal detail women’s experiences of prenatal testing to diagnose potential disability (Sandelowski 1994), the definition of pregnancy itself as disability (Byron and Roscigno 2014), and the embodiment of disabilities (Ezzell 2012; Hammer 2012).

In addition, of the 69 research articles found in 2016 in a search for mentions of “disability” or “ableism” within Gender & Society, less than one-third of these publications make substantive claims about disability as a social location, identity, or experience in its own right. Articles by Jacquelyn Litt and Mary Zimmerman (2003), Maggie Andersen (2005), Judith Taylor (2008), Nancy Naples (2013), and Zakiya Luna (2016) mention disability as an important intersectional issue in passing, calling for others to address it more fully. Most articles appearing in these searches only give cursory attention to disability, without defining or problematizing the concept, identity, or experience within the analysis. However, compared to mainstream generalist sociology journals, Gender & Society is still in the forefront of attention to disability with the exception of specialty journals in the area of health and illness. It is our hope that the work showcased in this special issue will inspire other sociologists to consider disability as a social category and regularly include disability as a key dimension of intersectional analysis.

Disability as a Category of Analysis

Disability as a category of analysis is defined and categorized in varied ways. This contributes to some difficulties identifying a cohesive literature in the sociology of disability. The World Health Organization’s (WHO) International Classification of Functioning Disability and Health (ICF) lays out principles to help define disability types (Ustun et al. 2003). While the starting point for definitions of disability is often the characterization of individuals’ impairments, the ICF currently defines disability by considering it not as an “attribute of the individual” but rather a state resulting from the interaction between person and environment (Ustun et al. 2003, 40-42, as cited in Tarraf et al. 2016). Following the lead of the ICF, then, scholars often categorize disabilities into three subgroups: physical limitations, mental health and/or cognitive limitations, or sensory limitations, with most of the latter being either vision or hearing impairments (Ustun et al. 2003, 40-42). In the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), one in every four women have a diagnosed disability (2015). African American women and Latinas are diagnosed with a disability at an even higher rate. They also face additional challenges in lack of access to health care, as well as discrimination in other institutional settings such as workplaces and education, as Angel Miles and Moya Bailey and Izetta Autumn Mobley detail in their contribution to this special issue.

While specific impairments and populations may be investigated in disparate ways across the sociological literature, scholars in feminist disability studies and the sociology of disability generally conceptualize disability as a social category in its own right; that is, individuals may have diverse impairments, but are all subject to ableist processes that result in their exclusion and marginalization. One major goal of disability scholars is to use investigations of particular experiences to build toward a theoretical understanding of the larger sociopolitical category of disability and the hegemonic norm of ableism. Although scholars in the field of disability studies argue that disability is a social category and many of the originators of disability studies were sociologists (see, e.g., Zola 1972), ¹ the broader discipline of sociology has yet to fully engage with this conceptualization.

Progress has been made within the field over the last decade, most notably evident in the establishment of the Disability and Society Section of the ASA in 2011. Still, topics related to disability studies (e.g., issues of physical function, learning disabilities, or mental health outcomes) are sometimes addressed in other subfields of sociology, but intersectional approaches are less frequently found. For example, as Angela Frederick and Dara Shifrer (2018, 2) noted, “The discipline has not offered much in the way of expansive intersectional analyses of race and disability beyond social determinants of health. This omission is quite stunning, given that racism and ableism are powerful interacting forces in contemporary issues of concern to sociologists, including mass incarceration and the school-to-prison pipeline.”

While interdisciplinary feminist scholars have been at the forefront of the new field of disability studies, disability also remains undertheorized and underrepresented in gender and intersectional feminist scholarship.

Intersectionality and Feminist Disability Studies

As with many feminist insights developed through movement praxis, intersectional analysis was a feature of black feminist praxis long before it was given a name by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989. ² Feminist scholars have adopted and expanded upon intersectionality as a conceptual framework and analytical tool over the past several decades (Nash 2008). As first articulated by feminist legal scholar Crenshaw (1989), intersectionality highlights the “multidimensionality” of individuals’ lived experiences (139) and the systems of oppression shaping them. While this theoretical framework and analytic tool developed out of black feminist scholarship, critical race, theory, and legal studies, feminist scholars in a wide range of disciplines and interdisciplinary sites have adopted intersectionality to examine the co-construction of race, gender, and class in shaping individual, collective, and structural conditions.

Despite its analytic power to incorporate analysis of diverse forms of power and inequality into the framework, disability remains consistently missing from most contemporary intersectional studies in sociology. Nonetheless, some feminist, queer, and critical race scholars in disability studies have taken the lead in deepening engagement with theoretical debates in other praxis-oriented interdisciplinary fields (e.g., Bell 2012; Erevelles 2011; Kafer 2013; Kozleski 2015; Magana and Ben-Moshe 2014; Schalk 2018). Disability activists working outside of academia—particularly disabled people of color—also produce intersectional scholarship, as evidenced in the academic and activist work oriented toward disability justice (e.g., Berne 2015; Dunhamn et al. 2015; Harriet Tubman Collective 2016; Piepzna-Samarasinha 2018).

The first principle of disability justice is a commitment to intersectional work (Berne 2015). In that spirit, we recognize the structural and cultural constraints that limit the opportunities of scholars of color and scholars with disabilities and acknowledge our backgrounds and privilege as the coeditors of this issue. We came to propose this special issue as elected officers of the Disability and Society and Race, Class, and Gender Sections of the ASA, and as current and former members of the Gender & Society editorial board. In these roles, we worked together to organize a number of jointly sponsored paper sessions on feminist disability studies for the 2017 and 2018 ASA meetings. Our commitment to expanding the visibility of feminist disability scholarship shaped our investment in proposing the special issue, but our privilege contributed to us being able to do so. As nondisabled white women, our access to institutions and social networks was facilitated by our able-bodied privilege; we never had to contend with a lack of accessibility to formal and informal spheres, nor the ableism that manifests as attitudinal barriers, in academe. Our whiteness meant we have not had to deal with systematic racism that disenfranchises people of color in academia and beyond. As editors, allies, and intersectional feminist scholars engaged in different ways with the field of disability studies, our goal was to facilitate a diverse range of disability scholars to showcase their empirical and theoretical work, to demonstrate the ways in which intersectional feminist scholarship is central to the field of disability studies, and to show how analyses attentive to disability advance the intersectional feminist project in sociology. In the process of creating and reviewing for this special issue, however, we set a high bar. In calling for pieces that could contribute equally and substantially to our knowledge about gender, disability, and intersectionality, we were carving out a very small and sophisticated subfield within feminist sociology. Kathy Davis (2008) argued that intersectionality might be considered a “buzz word” with a “lack of analytic distinctions and critical definition” (as quoted in Weigman 2012, 242). This feature is especially evident in the challenge that many scholars have in articulating how their work engages with intersectionality both in terms of epistemology and methodology. Jennifer Nash (2008) and Leslie McCall (2005) highlighted some “paradoxes,” omissions, and “methodological murkiness” in its use. In particular Nash (2008, 4) noted the “lack of a clearly defined intersectional methodology, the use of black women as prototypical intersectional subjects, the ambiguity inherent to the definition of intersectionality, and the coherence between intersectionality and lived experiences of multiple identities” as several of the key dilemmas facing scholars who adopt an intersectional approach. Robyn Weigman (2012, 297) pointed to additional challenges faced by scholars who engage with intersectionality that adds to the limits of “the U.S.-centricity of intersectionality’s founding theory of power, history and subordination” to the problems scholars face in engagement with intersectionality as an analytic framework.

McCall emphasized how even with the increased use of intersectionality as a conceptual and analytic tool, “there has been little discussion of how to study intersectionality, that is, of its methodology” (2005, 1771). McCall shed a light on how researchers differently apply “anticategorical,” “intracategorical,” and “intercategorical” approaches to intersectionality, and how we still lack coherence in the application of this framework. McCall, Davis, and Nash made clear how difficult it is to utilize the framework and analytic tools of intersectionality, as we also discovered in the process of reviewing manuscripts for the special issue. That there is no established roadmap or guide for how to use intersectionality as a tool gives authors both difficulty and flexibility as they embark on their analyses. However, to successfully produce an intersectional analysis, “a researcher must clearly specify what makes the study intersectional, discuss why certain methodologies chosen for the study are the most productive for intersectional research, and reflect on which aspects of intersectionality are brought into the frame and which are left out or treated less centrally in the analysis” (Naples 2017, 113). Consequently, “given the diversity of conceptualizations and disciplinary approaches, it is often difficult for new researchers to identify the most effective intersectional perspectives and models for their own research” (Naples 2017, 113).

Overview of Special Issue

The authors included in this issue take up our challenge and, not surprisingly, utilize the tool of intersectionality differently. Michelle Maroto, David Pettinicchio, and Andrew Patterson adopt an intercategorical intersectional model in their analysis of survey data to explore the intersection of disability with gender, race, and education to reveal the differential economic insecurity of different individuals and groups with disability. They conclude that “the relative effect of disability on poverty levels tended to be greater among more disadvantaged groups” and “the effects of disability further compounded the effects of race, gender and education for members of these social categories.” Adopting an intersectional methodology allowed them to tease out the complexity of these relationships.

Robyn Brown and Mairead Moloney apply Garland-Thomson’s (2005) feminist disability studies’ perspective to their analysis of longitudinal survey data to examine the intersection of work and well-being for women and people with and without disabilities in the workplace. The data set limited their ability to incorporate race and to go beyond a binary approach to gender. Of course, this is a challenge faced by most researchers using established quantitative data sets for intersectional analysis. However, by taking an intersectional approach, these authors are able to show the additional impact of workplace discrimination on psychological well-being that goes beyond the emphasis on economic outcomes that are often the sole foci of many of the previous studies that draw on survey data.

The authors also bring into focus new theoretical interventions that enhance and complicate intersectional analysis. Egner adopts the innovative method of virtual ethnography in her narrative analysis of blog posts to explicate “neuroqueer disidentification.” Her paper incorporates an intersectional queer and crip theoretical framework to challenge normative notions of identity categorization and boundaries “between disabled and ‘normal’ identities.” She makes a persuasive case for considering “neuroqueer disidentification” as a powerful discursive frame and set of practices designed to contest discrimination and normalization.

Bailey and Mobley put black feminist thought into conversation with disability studies and black studies to generate an intersectional black feminist disability framework. They hold both academic formations to account for failure to address, in the first case, the “long disinvestment in black health” and lack of attention to gender and disability in the other case. Bailey and Mobley emphasize how queer and trans people of color “have pushed back on the understandings of the social model of disability.” Furthermore, Egner and Bailey and Mobley challenge normalizing political moves. For example, Bailey and Mobley point to activist efforts that are “opposed to demanding disabled representation and access to mainstream arenas of power” and instead take the approach of also “valuing crip spaces” as empowering sites of political subjectivity.

Angel Miles draws on insights from black feminist thought (Collins 2000) to understand how constructions of African American women as “strong black women” contour the decision making of African American women with physical disabilities. In her mixed-method design, she explores how self-concept and internalization of the “strong black woman” troupe play a key role in African American women’s caretaking and everyday survival strategies. She applies a feminist intersectional disability framework to uncover the obstacles and supports for African American women with physical disabilities to achieve homeownership.

We received 28 submissions and from a review of those we could not include, we are keenly aware of the areas of research and scholarship missing from the special issue. We would have liked to include articles that engage with identities and experiences outside the United States and those that adopt a transnational, postcolonial, and indigenous perspective. We also would have liked to include a broader range of institutional analyses. These would include research in the fields of criminology, higher education, youth studies, religious studies, and culture. The role of the state is also a significant gap in this special issue. Considering the reputation of Gender & Society within the field of feminist sociology, we are very excited to bring attention to disability as a central dynamic of social life and systems of inequality in this high-impact journal. Our hope is that this effort will give rise to a new wave of intersectional research with disability as a significant analytic dimension.