Introduction

Women with disabilities are two to three times more likely to be on the receiving end of violence than their non-disabled counterparts and ‘forced sterilisation’ has been acknowledged as a critical human rights issue facing disabled women and girls in a variety of international contexts’. D. Goodley and K. Runswick Cole argue that the violence of disability discrimination takes multiple overlapping forms, including the real, the psycho-emotional, the systematic and the cultural. The experience of the disabled subject – the disability perspective – has been ignored, hidden, suppressed, unspoken and unexamined. Disability is the graveyard of the fears and anxieties of non-disabled culture, the burial plot for normate pity and disgust. Extricating disability identity from the asocial mire of ‘the natural’, where easy explanations prosper, has proved a more difficult enterprise for disabled people than for women, black and gay people. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.