ABSTRACT
For women with disabilities, negotiating spaces of everyday life, such as the home and work place, is often a difficult, contradictory and oppressive experience. This is because experiencing spaces through a disabled body not only involves significant physical and mental challenges, dealing with significant limits to one’s capacities to act, but also encountering and responding to complex, often confusing social rules and cultural codes which mark the disabled body as negatively different and less valuable than the ‘taken-for-granted’ (norm) of the able body. ‘Cultural oppression’ is the term used by Iris Young (1990) to refer to this social construction of difference as negatively ‘other’. It occurs, she argues, through an array of discursive and practical reactions to those who differ from culturally dominant groups. At one extreme are conscious, overt acts, such as racist remarks. At the other are mundane responses to someone who is perceived as different or ‘other’—responses such as ignoring their presence or reacting to them in ways that help to mark them as negatively different (e.g. singling a visibly disabled person out for unwanted attention).
