ABSTRACT

This chapter advances an understanding of disability as an epistemology within the women’s movement, as well as in women’s studies. The women’s movement, which is wide-ranging and diverse, has steadily moved to create women’s studies programmes. The author underscores the potential and challenges of locating disability in women’s studies, which has opened up new understandings of gender, sexuality, land rights, caste oppression and LGBT concerns but has not fought the hegemony of the normative. The invisibility of women with physical and psychosocial disabilities in mainstream women’s studies academia sustains a status quo where the ‘disabled woman’ is incorporated within existing social patterns as a ‘problem’. Disability thus remains an out-and-out state, both politically and academically – it is the source of its own oppression. This suggests that more is at stake than a problematizing discourse of specific categories. The author asserts that identity is not an idle insertion into political discourse; rather, it has critical implications for an understanding of disability within academia and advocacy. The author’s insider position and her deployment of the Indian Association of Women’s Studies as a case study enable her to conclude that knowledge about disability opens up a radical re-imagining of new and troubling questions.