Disabled women and transnational feminisms: shifting boundaries and frontiers

Abstract

From the standpoint of a non-disabled feminist, the paper explores the transnational activism of disabled women. Under the light of shifting boundaries between women and frontiers among cultures and nations, the possible tensions between disability rights and feminist movements are also considered. Thus, disabled women’s concerns are reviewed in the discourse of their organizations and in their achievements within the United Nations. As a result, a defensive strategy for the protection of disabled women’s human rights is identified as intertwined with a proactive engagement in radical democracy practices. This strategy is considered as furthering coalitions with other oppressed groups, and therefore as an outstanding example of the potentialities of transnational human rights discourse in alliance-building.

Keywords:

• disabled women
• feminism
• transnational activism
• human rights

Acknowledgements

Some of the results presented in this paper were first published in Spanish in Feminismo/s (13), 49–68, 2009. I am grateful for the journal’s permission to include them here. I would also like to thank the School of Sociology and Social Policy of the University of Leeds for welcoming me as visiting scholar, especially to Dr. Angharad Beckett for her help, comments and interest in my research. Finally, many thanks to the International Network of Women with Disabilities for accepting me as an allied woman and being able to participate in their discussions.

This work has been supported by the Pre-doctoral Fellowship and Grand Scheme of Commission for Universities and Research of the Department of Innovation, Universities and Enterprise of the Generalitat of Catalunya and the European Social Fund, and with the help of the Centre of Research in Theories and Practices that Overcome Inequalities of the University of Barcelona (CREA – UB).

Notes

1. Three organizations met those criteria: Disabled Peoples’ International (http://www.dpi.org), The World Blind Union (http://worldblindunion.org) and the European Disability Forum (http://www.edf-feph.org). The website of Mobility International USA (http://www.miusa.org) was especially useful for completing the list.

2. Weibernetz e.V. (http://www.weibernetz.de/english.html) and WorldEnable – Internet Accessibility Initiative (http://www.worldenable.net/).

3. All quotes were collected and selected during June and July, 2008.