Abstract
This editorial introduces our Special Issue on disability as a feminist issue, which began from the central point that disability is profoundly gendered, and that important feminist issues are intricately interwoven with disability. We aim to locate the Special Issue in larger frameworks of scholarship on gender, feminist psychologies and disability studies. Our editorial outlines the contributions to the Special Issue, exploring voice, embodiment, power, sexuality, care, labour, hetero/sexism, disablism, and ableism.
This Special Issue began from the central point that disability is profoundly gendered, and that important feminist issues are intricately interwoven with disability. These include issues such as the construction of the ideal subject, embodied difference, reproductive politics, citizenship rights, and the ethics of care, to name just a few. Yet, feminist scholars often approach these topics without referring to disability and/or impairment, and often crucially failing to recognise the tensions between disability and other axes of difference (inter alia gender, sexuality, race). While we may agree that disability is an important component of intersectional identity, there is often less focus on it than on other identity categories. As such, disability is often an absent-presence in mainstream feminist scholarship. Likewise, studies of disability from a feminist or gendered perspective are relatively uncommon (Liddiard, 2018a; Morris, 1996).
For instance, few of the articles published in Feminism & Psychology in the last 3 decades consider disability alongside other social characteristics, and certainly not as the central focus. A good example of an article published in Feminism & Psychology that draws on disability (Slater, 2015) was in response to an earlier Feminism & Psychology special issue on young women and feminism (edited by Leibert & Thompson, 2015). Slater's (2015, p. 58) contribution was written “in the hope of reaching out/asking for advice/joining with others about how or indeed whether we can ‘do feminisms’ within the academy” when academia is inherently “a patriarchal and ableist arena.” However, few issues of Feminism & Psychology even mention disability at all.
It may seem peculiar for fields founded upon the interrogation of identity and difference, both with strong connections to activism, not to have established strong scholarship addressing the intersection of power relations centred on disability and gender (along with other categories of differentiation). Feminist scholarship—as featured in a journal foregrounding feminist theories, methodologies, and herstories—would benefit from the consideration of and deeper engagement with disability, as many contributors to this Special Issue argue. Our impetus for this Special Issue, then, is to make space to showcase politics, theory, and research that situate disability as a feminist issue.
We are immensely proud of this Special Issue. Over 18 months, we have taken time to read, review, and engage with some very important contributions in this collection. Part of this process has been about taking our time, purposefully engaging in slow/er forms of scholarship. Slow scholarship “questions the ever-increasing demands of academic life, placing them broadly within wider tendencies toward neoliberal university governance” (Mountz et al., 2015, p. 1238). It involves resistance, engaging slowly with the object of study, engaging with others, and improving the quality of academic practices such as writing (Mountz et al., 2015). We have done this purposefully to acknowledge and resist the ableist academy as we experience it as disabled and feminist scholars.
Critical to the way in which disabled women (and others) theorise, disability in the world inherently relates to the conditions of an ableist academy (Goodley, 2024). Scholars and researchers are now more cognisant of the ableist environments in which we work, and the ways in which certain types of bodies and minds are both unexpected and unwelcome in the academy (Brown & Leigh, 2018). For example, many types of bodies disrupt the “masculine disembodied ideal academic worker norm” (Ollilainen, 2018, p. 961). Disabled bodies (Brown & Leigh, 2018, 2020), pregnant bodies (Ollilainen, 2018), bodies that miscarry (Liddiard, 2018b), queer bodies (Prock et al., 2019), sick bodies (Wilkinson & Wilkinson, 2023), and neurodivergent bodies and minds (Phillips, 2024) all contravene the expected embodied norms upon which the ableist academy rests. Wilkinson and Wilkinson (2023, p. 4) draw attention to the ways in which sick, disabled, and ill bodies and people have to labour to “perform (un)spoiled academic identities.” Hiding, keeping up, disclosing, pushing yourself, coping, passing, and masking are all practices that require emotional and other forms of labour for disabled and chronically ill people, both inside and outside of the academy (Liddiard et al., 2022). Thus, to try and mitigate some of these ableist realities, we have actively centred feminist ways of being and doing, and an ethic of care, while building this scholarly collection together, for authors, contributors, and ourselves.
In the first part of this editorial, then, we trace the intersections of disability theory and feminist voices, and the ways in which disabled women's own research, scholarship, experience, and voice fundamentally reshape dominant ways of thinking about disability. Our sketching of this brief history and landscape, we hope, lays a helpful and accessible foundation for those new to feminist explorations of disability, while also setting a context for the important contributions from authors that make up this Special Issue. Next, we provide an overview of the contributions to the Special Issue through a thematic lens, exploring voice, embodiment, power, sexuality, care, labour, hetero/sexism, disablism, and ableism. We conclude by calling for greater intersectionality and inclusivity within feminist scholarship and research; a welcoming in, of, and desire for disability, not merely as an object of study but as the driving subject of a more inclusive and intersectional feminism.
Disability as a feminist issue
Disability theory and politics in the Global North have long been dominated by the social model of disability (Oliver, 1990). Born out of an early founding organisation of the British disability movement in the 1970s—the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation—social model politics have radically shifted the meaning of “disability” from the bodies of individuals to a product of the social world. The social model offers a predominantly Marxist and materialist-orientated approach to disability, laying “the blame for disabled people's oppression clearly at the feet of economic relations in capitalistic society” (Meekosha & Shuttleworth, 2009, p. 55). For context, in the social model of disability, “impairment” as the bodily bio-physiological condition of disability is marginalised in favour of a focus on “disability” as a complex set of social relations that structure the experience of impairment. In this sense, the social model mirrors early (mainstream) feminist movements that distinguished between sex (as a “natural” entity) and gender (the cultural construction of one's sex; Rubin, 1975). The social model was, and is, a deeply powerful rethinking of disability and disablement; it serves as a cultural and political reimagining of disability for disabled people, their communities, and movements. As disabled feminist Liz Crow (1996, p. 207) states, the social model enabled a “vision of ourselves free from the constraints of disability (oppression) and provided a commitment for our social change—I don’t think it's an exaggeration to say the social model has saved lives.”
Yet, despite the social model's emergence as the revolutionary reconceptualisation of disability in the 1990s, important omissions began to be highlighted by disabled feminists of the era. Where were our own bodies, emotions, and experiences of impairment, disability, and social oppression (see Crow, 1996; Lonsdale, 1990; Thomas, 1999)? Such important interjections echoed the “deconstruction of the public/private divides” (Sherry, 2004, p. 776) advocated by mainstream feminist theorists of the time. Disabled feminists’ emotional lives and embodied stories were often derided as “sentimental biography” (Barnes, 1998, as cited in Goodley, 2011, p. 28) by male disability theorists of the era. Yet such stories were integral to centring material experiences of impairment such as pain, illness, and fatigue, and the emotionality of these bodily experiences. These lived experiences of disability were actively silenced in early social model understandings. Thus, this attention to embodiment echoed movements in other areas of social sciences to “bring the body back” (see Leder, 1990; Shilling, 2003), and a recognition that for many disabled women and people, the impaired body “experiences real pain, nausea, fatigue and weakness” (Thomas, 2002, p. 69; see also Morris, 1991).
Carol Thomas’s (2002) later theorisation of impairment effects was key too. Not only was impairment the focus, but impairment effects, which she defined as “the direct effects of impairment which differentiate bodily functioning from that which is socially construed to be normal or usual” (p. 20), were important. Her rationale for thinking about impairment effects was clear: “in our society, these impairment effects generally, but not always, become the medium for the social relational enactment of disability: social exclusionary and discriminatory practices” (Thomas, 2002, p. 20).
As well as instigating recognition of impairment and the body, disabled feminists have made significant strides in locating gender within analyses of disability, a distinctly undertheorised dimension of disabled people's lives (Ghai, 2002; Liddiard, 2018a). Understanding the ways in which gender shapes disabled women's lives has been important not only in affirming disabled women as gendered subjects—rather than those denied a gender identity—but also in enabling examination of the impacts of hetero/sexism and patriarchy upon disabled women. As Goodley (2011, p. 35) reminds us, disabled women are: more likely to be poor than disabled men; are less likely to have access to rehabilitation and employment; are more likely to experience public space as threatening; and are more likely to live in the parental home and experience sexual abuse.
Furthermore, in advocating gendered subjectivities, and theorising through their own lived and embodied experiences, disabled feminists have also reified the ways in which structural, patriarchal, and ableist oppression feels. Related to our (disabled feminists’) lived experiences of the body, and of ableism, are the ways in which we feel about, relate to, and care for our bodies. As Goodley (2011, p. 716) states, oppression is “felt psychically, subjectively and emotionally but is always socially, culturally, politically and economically produced.” Many contributions in this Special Issue take up themes of emotion and oppression: the emotionality of abuse, care, loss, exclusion, and objectification in contexts of disability. As Thomas (2006, p. 182) proposes, psychoemotional disablism is a mode of “disablism that works with and upon gendered realities; it operates along psychological and emotional pathways and frequently results in disabled people being made to feel worthless, useless, of lesser value, unattractive, a burden.” Central to this, then, are disabled people's psychic responses to living in disabling cultures: the psycho-emotional consequences of oppression and the ways in which this may be internalised, managed, negotiated, and resisted. As Marks (1999, p. 615) puts it: “it is important to examine not just the relationship that people have with others, but also the relationship they have with themselves.”
Feminist disability studies has been integral to the development of critical disability studies (CDS), which draws on intersectionality theory (Crenshaw, 1991) to “connect the aspirations and ambitions of disabled people with the transformative agendas of class, feminist, queer and postcolonial studies” (Goodley, 2011, p. 174). As Goodley (2011, p. 33) states, “a body or mind that is disabled is also one that is raced, gendered, trans/nationally sited, aged, sexualized and classed.” CDS enables focus, then, on the intersections of disability life, connecting disability with the politics of class, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, while staying mindful of local, national, and global economic contexts and the impact of these upon disabled people (Goodley, 2014). As Meekosha and Shuttleworth (2009, p. 50) argue: The use of [CDS] signifies an implicit understanding that the terms of engagement in disability studies have changed; that the struggle for social justice and diversity continues but on another plane of development—one that is not simply social, economic and political, but also psychological, cultural, discursive and carnal. Importantly, critical disability studies seek to build upon, not discard, materialist approaches that are central to feminist disability theory.
At the same time, it 's important to document the exclusionary cultures and practices feminist disability studies itself has enabled and how these continue today (Ghai, 2002). For example, women with learning disabilities were markedly excluded from early disabled women's movements, communities, and spaces (Rogers, 2009). This continues despite the fact that the “lives, bodies and selves of learning-disabled women remain overtly targeted for many of the interventions disabled feminists protest (e.g., forced sterilisation; the removal of children), being routinely denied their reproductive and parenting rights” (Liddiard, 2018a, p. 21). Much of this exclusion is embedded in an ableism that posits that women with learning disabilities are still regarded as fundamentally different from other women (McCarthy, 2009). Similarly, feminist disability theory has somewhat overlooked the experiences of psychiatric survivors—Mad women and those who experience mental distress and illness and live with psychiatric diagnoses (Beresford et al., 2010; LeFrançois et al., 2013).
Garland-Thompson (2005, p. 1557) states that, “like feminism itself, feminist disability studies is academic cultural work with a sharp political edge and a vigorous critical punch.” Crucially, our positionality to feminism and disability are worthy of attention here as editors of this Special Issue. Kirsty Liddiard is a feminist disability scholar and disabled researcher whose work explores ableism and disablism in the lives of disabled people and their families. Ableism is defined as “a system of beliefs that privileges normate notions of the body/mind and ability that are culturally constructed and views disabled people as inferior and lacking” (Bê, 2020, p. 421), while disablism is the resultant oppressive treatment of disabled people. Liddiard's work typically centres on lived experience, emotion, and embodiment as core axes through which to understand disabled people's everyday lives. Moreover, her creative approaches to coproduction (see Liddiard et al., 2019, 2022) rest upon a key leitmotif of the disabled people's movement: nothing about us without us (Charlton, 1998). Rebecca Lawthom is a Professor of Community Psychology who has extensive experience in galvanising research across a range of education, health, social care, and social science disciplines, and she combines this with interests in community-led approaches to coproduction and participatory research. Her groundbreaking theorising on disability has explored affect (Goodley et al., 2022), disability politics and theory (Goodley & Lawthom, 2019; Goodley et al., 2019), learning disability (Hunter et al., 2020), the pandemic (Fisher et al., 2020), and ageing (Lawthom et al., 2018), to name a few. We are both White women located in the Global North, based in a British university in the north of England.
Importantly, this Special Issue prioritises the feminist scholarship of disabled women and gender-nonconforming people and their allies; and feminist interrogations, analyses, and experiences of blindness, neurodivergence, trauma, congenital and acquired impairment, contested forms of illness, and energy-limiting conditions. We have also purposefully sought to include scholarship from the Global South (namely, Latin America and South Africa), in recognition of how disability studies “retains an indiscriminate focus on the global North, echoing the voices of Northern academics and activists, particularly those in the UK and the US” (Grech, 2015, p. 6; see also Ghai, 2002). In working across these intersections, we are mindful of our privilege as editors and sensemakers.
Articles in the issue: A roadmap for our readers
We now offer a roadmap of what's to come in this Special Issue.
In “Complaining while disabled: Disabled people's experiences expressing complaints within the context of sexuality,” Ásta Jóhannsdóttir and Embla Guðrúnar Ágústsdóttir (2025, this issue) powerfully take up disability, sexuality, and microaggressions as spaces to make sense of complaint for disabled people. Working within theories of emotional work and labour, Jóhannsdóttir and Ágústsdóttir demarcate the everyday kinds of emotional labour demanded or expected of disabled people in contexts of intimacy. Importantly, they draw on “emotional disability work”: forms of work that are often “invisible, conditional, and an inseparable part of being a disabled person” and that are usually “carried out as a result of the fear and shame of causing discomfort to others” (p. 179). Such labour and performance (both for the self and for others) have implications for disabled people. In sum, the authors argue that the forms of disability work explored in the article, especially in relation to complaining or objecting, can hinder disabled people's access to their own erotic self. Working from an Icelandic context, one in which feminism is often positively heralded, readers are presented with intersectional complexity.
In “‘Hey, where's my low-key sexist objectification?’: A blind woman's reflections on being banished and liberated from normative femininity and the gaze,” Michelle Botha (2025, this issue) presents an autoethnography of her “negotiating tricky identity-related terrain as sociocultural beliefs about disability, femininity, impairment, and sexuality interact with [her] embodiment as a blind woman” (p. 155). Challenging social theory that advocates the transformative power of blindness and disability for the ways in which it can lead to emancipatory exclusions from visual cultures and patriarchal constructions of women's value, Botha asks what it means to be excluded from the gaze. Ultimately, being excluded is painful and harmful, as well as liberatory. Botha also proffers the power of autoethnography as a means to make space for a surfacing and shoring up of the everyday realities of living at the intersections of ableism and sexism: autoethnography brings to “light the often unseen personal, relational, and practical predicaments that disabled people face” (p. 157). To explore exclusion from the gaze and social and sexual legitimacy, Botha reflects on an interaction in a coffee shop, where she wasn’t objectified in the same ways as other women customers were. She concludes by highlighting the generative possibilities of such explorations: “to viewing blind women not as existing beyond the demands of the gender regime and visual culture, but as navigating within these systems (along with everyone else)” (p. 168).
In “Women with disabilities and the loss of custody of their children: “Carers, but not mothers,” Pía Rodríguez-Garrido et al. (2025, this issue) explore motherhood, care, and constructions of “fitness” to mother in a Chilean context. Centring situated feminist epistemologies across three distinct studies, each of which explored disability and motherhood in differing ways, the authors focus on a series of tensions experienced by disabled Chilean mothers. Such tensions shore up conflicts within identities of care and caring across familial contexts; poor responses, accommodations, and support for motherhood from within institutions such as support services, healthcare, and, most critically, the judicial process; and the influences of ableism with and upon child custody processes. They conclude that such tensions “reveal a web of practices of violence against women with disabilities, particularly in their role as mothers and carers” (p. 261).
In “Feminist ethic of care in academic knowledge production: Reflections from disability researchers,” Constanza López Radrigán et al. (2025, this issue) reflect upon care as an ethical foundation in the processes of academic knowledge production. Writing from Latin America, the authors explore key themes of interdependence, vulnerability, and care practices from interviews with researchers aligned to feminist disability studies to proffer a care ethic “based on the experience with disability, the emotions emerging from this encounter, and a space of reflexivity that leads to certain actions and alliances” (p. 282). They situate this within the neoliberal-able (Goodley & Lawthom, 2019) demands of academic research and scholarly knowledge economies, advocating that a “caring approach to disability must involve an orientation toward shared knowledge production” (p. 284).
In “Toward the emancipation of ‘medically unexplained’ and energy-limiting conditions: Contesting and re-imagining psy through the lens of feminist disability studies,” Joanne Hunt (2025, this issue), writing from a Swedish context, applies a feminist disability studies lens to contested forms of illness to explore how psy may be transformed, even emancipated, “through reimagining disability in a socioculturally and biopolitically cognisant, embodied, and maximally inclusive manner” (p. 187). Reiterating the ways that (mainstream) feminist literature overlooks the gendered and intersectional nature of disability, Hunt argues for how including and integrating disability “can add value to critical feminist contestations of psy,” underscoring the importance “of including an intersectional understanding of disability in feminist praxis” (p. 189).
In “Fitting comfortably together: Doing and imagining gender and sexuality in personal assistance,” Harvey Humphrey et al. (2025, this issue) explore the experiences of disabled young people negotiating gender and sexuality as part of personal assistance in a British context. The empirical study at the heart of the article uses queer, trans, and disabled feminist research and theory along with composite vignettes to explore how: diverse gender and sexual identities were made part of personal assistance, from the imaginative ways these were suggested in support plans or written into recruitment adverts, to the interactions that took place around the body and in the home in which genders and sexualities are enacted or displayed as valued identities, but which also occasion risks and vulnerabilities. (p. 229)
a lot to learn about the potential for more harmonised and ethical relationships [in personal assistance] through looking at the work disabled young people do, and have to do, around identifying and recruiting PAs [personal assistants], as well as the structures that impinge and shape those decisions, and the potential good and bad bargains on offer. (p. 242)
In “Constructions of ‘female autism’ in professional practices: A Foucauldian discourse analysis,” Isobel Moore et al. (2025, this issue) apply a Foucauldian lens to examine how “female autism” is constructed in professional practices. Offering a feminist analysis of (female) autism in relation to power, professionals, institutions, and governmentality, their contribution to this Special Issue asks a series of questions: How is female autism constructed in professional practices? What possibilities do these constructions allow or disallow? And, what implications do these constructions have for women and girls? Following an analysis of texts provided by UK-based clinicians, the answers to these questions draw upon notions of identification and what counts as “progress” and “medical advancement”; expansions of autism and the reach of the expert gaze; and female autism as reinforcing binaristic and essentialist constructions of gender. Importantly, the authors demarcate real care in their problematising of “female autism,” not aiming to undermine the lived experiences of women who seek diagnosis, but to help practitioners “to reflect on how best to serve the well-being of women by taking the claim seriously that female autism is embedded in wider gender politics, and thus its potential to reproduce gendered power, inequality, and distress” (p. 222).
In, “Disability, trauma, and the place of affect in identity: Examining performativity in visual impairment rehabilitation,” Brian Watermeyer and Michelle Botha (2025, this issue) critically explore rehabilitation, materiality, and performativity, drawing on two distinct qualitative data sources: (a) interviews with service users and providers in rehabilitation organisations in South Africa, and (b) a vignette about a graduation ceremony from a South African rehabilitation organisation. The authors apply a critical disability studies lens to examine rehabilitation services for visually impaired people as, in part, “an amplified instantiation of disciplinary social forces maintaining heteronormative, ableist, and neoliberal norms” (p. 138). Taking up affect and emotion as theoretical lenses, the authors explore the inherent overlooking and sidelining of trauma that may accompany vision loss and forms of progressive blindness in rehabilitation services, and critically question the kinds of docile subjectivities that rehabilitation services and imperatives produce. They advocate “explicit theorising on how this ‘corrective tendency’ impacts on the ability of disabled people to work through trauma” (p. 150).
Conclusion
We conclude by calling for greater intersectionality and inclusivity in feminist scholarship and research; a welcoming in, of, and desire for disability not merely as an object of study but as the driving subject of a more inclusive and intersectional feminism. As Garland-Thompson (2002, p. 28) asserts: integrating disability as a category of analysis, an historical community, a set of material practices, a social identity, a political position, and a representational system into the content of feminist—indeed into all—inquiry can strengthen the critique that is feminism.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We thank all of the authors who took such time and care in writing for this Special Issue. We thank Tracy Morison for her considerable support in coediting this Special Issue.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Dedication
We dedicate this Special Issue to Professor Anita Ghai. Professor Ghai's work transformed feminist disability studies through its centring of intersectionality, race, culture, and power. Her theory, politics, and advocacy were rooted in justice for disabled people and their communities. Rest in power, Anita.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Author Biographies
