Abstract
Ableism has been theorised, criticised and discussed between disabled people's activism and academia, mostly within the field of Disability Studies and less within Intersectionality and Gender Studies. Disabled people's social movements have criticised ableism for decades to highlight their oppression based on binary ideas of the normal and the deviant. Disability Studies has conceptualised ableism as a profoundly naturalised system of thought based on the hierarchisation of embodied abilities and the fetish of independence and productivity. The current study is part of a larger research project conducted by a feminist research group, and our research question was: how, by/for whom and for what purpose has ableism so far been intersectionally conceptualised in theory, research, activism and artwork? One of the project's aims is to combine a variety of sources on and approaches to ableism, which is why we conducted a) a systematic search of academic databases and b) a purposeful selection of additional sources based on our situated knowledges to identify sources on ableism's intersectionality, particularly the intersections of dis/ability and gender. Based on documented discussions of our final sample of 24 different sources on ableism in our research group, we organised our findings around two overarching aspects: Shaping and enforcing intersectional ableism and Surviving and disrupting ableism. While our research highlights the adverse impacts of intersectional oppression, it also emphasises the power and strength rooted in intersectionality. Disability as experiential background is not limited to discrimination either – it comes with joy and community and is an ever-present part of human life beyond the meaning given to it by the neoliberal imperative of independence and self-sufficiency. Ableism, in turn, does not only exist in the lives of disabled people; in its intersectionality it affects the way society is shaped as a whole.
Introduction
Ableism has been theorised, criticised and discussed between disabled people's activism and academia, the latter mostly within the field of Disability Studies and to a lesser extent in Intersectionality and Gender Studies. The literature on and engagement with ableism is growing, because of both the increasing scholarship on and advocacy against ableism. Many disabled people have for instance called out ableism in the digital sphere and share their experiences through specific hashtags on social media, podcasts or videos, as well as through projects such as book publications or (online) events (More, 2024). Ableism is deeply intertwined with other systems of oppression, and the notion of ability is in itself intersectional – that is, ablebodiedness refers not only to the nondisabled body but also to a specifically classed, gendered and racialised bodymind. Parts of the disability community have long realised the importance of intersectionality, especially through the disability justice movement which views intersectionality and disability justice, including disrupting ableism, as distinctively intertwined issues (Sins Invalid, n.d.). In turn, intersectionality research does not always consider disability. Focusing on ableism rather than disability could open further possibilities for the already existing dialogue between Disability Studies, Feminism and Intersectionality Studies (e.g. Annamma, 2021; Bailey and Mobley, 2019; Schalk and Kim, 2020).
Depending on the context, ableism may however refer to different things, which is why, in this article, we bring together activist/advocacy, artistic and academic perspectives whilst simultaneously embracing the in-between. Our aim was on the one hand to highlight diverse sources – some of them marginalised in academic contexts – that contribute to understanding ableism from different perspectives and to establish how, by/for whom and for what purpose ableism has been intersectionally conceptualised. Through our discussion of the collected sources and the associations we have made with them on the other hand, we initiated a storying process that we view as a form of theoretisation (Phillips and Bunda, 2020). As a feminist research group, we understand that (our) research is the product of (our) diverse and sometimes overlapping situatedness and knowledges (Haraway, 1988).
Disabled people's social movements have named and criticised ableism for several decades to highlight their oppression based on binary ideas of the normal and the deviant. This indicates a shift in thinking away from a primary focus on disability and towards ableism as a system of oppression. In everyday language as well as in some academic scholarship, however, ableism refers to discrimination and/or prejudice against disabled people, including microaggression and stereotypes (e.g. Nario-Redmond, 2019). Sometimes this is also referred to as disablism (e.g. see Goodley, 2014). Some scholars and activists argue that there is a difference between disablism and ableism (Goodley, 2014), while others do not make this distinction.
Disability Studies scholars such as Goodley (2014) and Wolbring (2008) have conceptualised ableism more broadly than in everyday contexts, as a profoundly naturalised system of thought based on the hierarchisation of embodied abilities and the fetish of independence, productivity and growth. Their and many other works on ableism draw from feminist disability scholarship that, although not always using the language of ‘ableism’, has created critical knowledge on the intersections of dis/ability and gender. Dis/ability written with a slash points to the mutual reliance of disability and ability, in the broadest sense (Goodley, 2014). Disability can only ever exist in relation to an idea of its counter pole, ability, and in turn, notions of ability, including but not limited to ablebodiedness, rely on their continuous distinction from what is defined as beyond normality. In the current study we focus on ableism's intersectionality, particularly in relation to gender. Through our collection and discussion of different sources, we discuss both ableism's roots in intersectional oppression and its intersection with other systems of oppression. We understand intersectionality in terms of the foundational works of Black feminist scholars such as Collins (1991) and Crenshaw (1997), and also draw from contributions by McCall (2005) and Winker and Degele (2011), who further differentiate multiple levels of intersectionality and the complexity of categories such as dis/ability and gender.
The research project: Ableism, the dis/ability binary and beyond
The present study is part of a larger research project funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) (funding number 10.55776/ESP414), and it is based on the close collaboration with disabled women with artistic, advocacy and activism and (community as well as academic) research backgrounds. Ethical approval was gained from the Ethics Committee of the University of Vienna (reference number 01060). The project consists of three stages, with this article representing the first. The theoretical framework of the study initially drew from Disability Studies scholars’ works on ableism, but as we proceeded, this framework was increasingly complemented and sometimes contested by non-academic sources and perspectives, e.g. artistic, activist and community-research, because this was important to the project collaborators with their specific backgrounds. This resonates with our methodological approach to ‘research through, with and as storying’ (Phillips and Bunda, 2020). The research question for the present study was: how, by/for whom and for what purpose has ableism so far been intersectionally conceptualised in theory, research, activism and artwork?
Our work as a feminist research group formally began in 2023 through a series of regular online meetings – due to our location in at the time four different countries and two continents. We got to know each other and established our group, and then began to share sources on, and experiences of, ableism, focusing on dis/ability, gender and intersectionality. As our collaboration progresses, we work towards a collective working definition of ableism for the purpose of our project. Our current understanding of ableism includes ableism as part of a larger system, as discrimination against disabled people, as intertwined with other forms of discrimination, as something invisible and unconscious, as internalised, as affecting all people and areas of life and as both systematic discrimination and discrimination at a micro level. Defining ableism is an ongoing process, hence the above is our working definition. Outlining our understanding of ableism is beneficial for our analysis of different sources on ableism in academia, activism and arts, and will be continued, revised and challenged at the future stages of the research.
Ableism, disability and intersectionality
Ableism and intersectionality, as well as disability, are lively concepts and their theoretisation is continuously evolving. Since disabled activists first named ableism, and since the authors cited above published some of the initial work conceptualising it, the concept and terminology has travelled across activist, artistic and academic spaces – and across a variety of countries and languages, mostly within but not limited to the Global North (More, 2025a). The most referenced scholarship on ableism is interdisciplinary and in the English language, and can be located within the field of Disability Studies. In activist spaces, the notion of ableism has – particularly due to online movements – travelled from the US to Germany, for instance, (Maskos, 2020) or been picked up in a Brazilian activist campaign (Gavério et al., 2019). In the disability arts and culture scene, ableism has been connected to crip theory (a queerfeminist approach to the dis/abled bodymind) and disability justice with its focus on intersectionality (Kuppers, 2017; Sins Invalid, n.d.). In theory, activism and arts, interlocking systems of oppression and intersectional experiences have been relevant to how ableism is conceptualised, with some conceptualisations explicitly focusing on white supremacy (Biss, 2019; Sins Invalid, n.d.). Not all approaches to ableism that consider interlocking forms of oppression centre the Black feminist perspectives that created intersectionality as a concept, however. At the same time, crip theory, Black Disability Studies scholarship and decolonial disability theory have theorised disability intersectionally in ways that contribute to conceptualising ableism (Annamma et al., 2018; Bailey and Mobley, 2019; Erevelles and Afeworki Abay, 2024; Schalk and Kim, 2020), even when ableism is not their main, only or sometimes even explicit focus.
Since coined by Crenshaw (1997) and other Black feminist scholars, the concept of intersectionality has also moved across spaces and has ‘left behind a lively and provocative travelogue characterized by adaptation, redirection, and contestation’ (Carbado et al., 2013: 304). Intersectionality scholarship has taken different political and theoretical dimensions as a work in progress and social movement, whilst travelling across and within disciplines as well as across national borders (Carbado et al., 2013; Cho et al., 2013). The delocalisation of intersectionality from its Black feminist origin and the simultaneous marginalisation of race and racism in intersectionality scholarship within white feminism as well as selectiveness regarding which intersecting inequalities are paid attention to has been criticised. Critics have argued that this depoliticises the concept of intersectionality (Christoffersen and Emejulu, 2023; Mohanty, 2013). While intersectionality did not originally include a focus on disability, and Disability Studies have often been criticised for their whiteness, scholars such as Annamma (2021) have argued that Black feminism and disability critical race theory (DisCrit) have much to gain from each other. Disability (and to a lesser extent ability and/or ableism) has been at the centre of some intersectionality research, particularly in the field of (special) education and with regard to racialised labelling and the overrepresentation of disabilities (Artiles, 2013; Boveda, 2024; Erevelles and Minear, 2010).
Something that (Black) feminism and feminist disability studies have in common is a focus on the subject and personal stories as political. Storytelling, for instance in the form of life writing, has been used in Black feminist work (Alormele, 2025; Jemal, 2024; Keys, 2021) to decolonise academic spaces and prioritise embodied knowledge, as well as in feminist Disability Studies (Mintz, 2007; Rice et al., 2020; Simplican, 2017) to trouble hegemonic ideas of what constitutes theory. Of course, some of this storytelling and life writing involves embodied experiences of class, gender, race and disability, both in terms of identity and in terms of the larger social structures. In addition, some of this work has shared theoretical underpinnings. Rice et al. (2020), for instance, draw from Black feminist thought in their arts-based disability storytelling project. Other forms of storytelling, for instance speculative fiction, also involve the intersections of disability, race, gender and class (Schalk, 2018). Many of the works centring stories use arts-based approaches, highlighting the interconnectedness of artistic and political practices of storytelling. As explained below, storying and stories as (counter) knowledge are central to our study of how ableism is conceptualised and to how we want to contribute to theorising ableism through our work.
Who we are and what we do
We are seven authors, currently situated in the Global North, connected to the research project Ableism, the dis/ability binary and beyond. Rahel is the project lead; she conceptualised the project proposal and applied for the funding. Marjorie, Eva E, Maria and Ingrid are collaborators with specific ableism-related knowledge, based on their work and experience as disabled women in various positions, and are part of this project throughout all stages as contractors. Marlene and Eva M contributed to the study as research assistants and, as such, were not involved at all stages of the research. Hereafter, we introduce ourselves briefly to highlight our positionality and knowledges that we bring to this research project.
1
Rahel More (she/her) is an academic researcher. She is involved in academic as well as advocacy contexts related to inclusion and disability. Rahel is a nondisabled white woman from a middleclass family, and currently lives in the country in which she grew up. Marjorie Aunos (she/her) is an independent scholar, author and psychologist in the field of parenting and disability. She became a feminist disability activist through public speaking and alliances of disabled parents, and addresses ableism through different initiatives. Marjorie has taught at several universities and is a well-known researcher, as well as a disabled mother. Eva Egermann (she/her) is an independent scholar, artist, author and disabled filmmaker. She is the initiator of several projects closely linked to the disability rights movement, including a self-published magazine and film projects. Eva has taught at numerous universities and art academies across Europe and has received several awards for her work. Maria R Palacios (she/her) is a disabled Latina poet, author, performer, speaker, social change advocate, disability rights activist, mentor and workshop facilitator. Her work includes various genres of art, ranging from written collections of rebellious poetic storytelling to spoken word pieces and sarcastic illustrations of disability-themed cartoons aimed at calling out ableism. Ingrid Palmer (she/her) is a speaker, author and social justice consultant. As a Black, gender expansive, visually impaired, former foster kid, her work focuses on challenging barriers to the full social and workplace inclusion of intersectional people living and working with chronic and episodic disabilities. Marlene Krubner (she/her) is a researcher and feminist disability rights activist with a focus on deinstitutionalisation and violence against disabled people. She works in various committees to improve the lives of people with disabilities. Marlene is a disabled white woman and currently a student of Inclusive Pedagogy in her country of origin. Eva Michl (she/her) is completing her master's degree in Educational Science, specialising in Inclusive Pedagogy with a focus on the out-school sector. She centres disability, inclusion and self-determination not only in her studies but also in her field of work: the psycho-social support for people with psychological disabilities. We also acknowledge our former collaborator Embla Guðrúnard Ágústsdóttir who had to step back from the project, and her contribution to the research and our group.
Method
For the current study, we conducted a mapping of sources addressing ableism's intersectionality and then engaged in in-depth collective discussions through which we connected existing theoretical, activist and artistic articulations of ableism with personal experiences, creating theory ourselves through storying. First, we conducted a systematic search following Tricco et al.’s (2018) checklist for scoping reviews, and then we added purposively selected sources from primarily non-academic contexts.
For the systematic search of the literature, Rahel conducted a title or keyword search for ‘ableis*’ at two different points in 2023 and 2024, in three large scientific databases (see Figure 1 and Supplementary material). It was a conscious decision to search for this particular terminology only, instead of including other related terms such as ‘disability’ or ‘crip’ in combination with disability, because our aim was to map the landscape of research that explicitly and primarily focuses on ableism, using this specific terminology. For the same reason, the search was limited to keywords and titles. Many texts mention ‘ableis*’ in some way but their main focus is not ableism. We did not limit the beginning of the time period in our search strategy but we put 2023 as the end point, and we limited the types of publication to books, book chapters and journal articles. We did not limit languages or countries of origin of the research. Through this strategy, 4221 publications were found initially, of which, after multiple steps conducted by Rahel with support of Marlene and Eva M, 12 were selected for the study based on their in-depth intersectional conceptualisation of gendered ableism, ranging from ableist body size discrimination to white supremacist carceral ableism, sexual ableism and the rhetoric of ableism and intersectionality (see Table 1). In terms of identity and/or structural dimensions, in the abstract of 10 of these 12 papers, we found references to race or racism in orientation of the understanding used by Winker and Degele (2011) in their multi-level approach. Nine of the 12 texts were theoretical essays, and three included empirical data. These 12 papers were read by the collaborators, commented on and then discussed in four online meetings.
Flow chart of systematic search.
Overview of systematically collected sources.
For the second part of the method, each collaborator purposefully selected around 30 sources that are, from our perspective, relevant to understanding ableism and its intersectionality. These sources could be academic, too, but we focused more on activist, artistic and community work. Together, the collaborators selected 116 additional sources on ableism. From our individual samples, we then each selected three sources (n = 12) that we found most important for understanding ableism from an intersectional perspective (see Table 2). This way we arrived at a total sample of 24 sources.
Overview of additional sources.
Each collaborator's specific positionality shaped their purposive choice of sources. Not all of the sources chosen in this way centre structural racism or experiences of racialisation as an integral aspect to intersectionality, reflecting what some Black feminist scholars have criticised - that some works claiming to take an intersectional approach fail to take sufficient account of race. While we acknowledge this, we also want to emphasise that as a living and moving concept, intersectionality is politically and analytically relevant to deconstructing global dimensions of power beyond the specific intersectional realities of Black women, as Carbado et al. (2013) noted.
Marjorie Aunos’ choice of her purposive sources reflected her aim to support, elevate and amplify the voices of parents who have a disability and are often misjudged and stigmatised. This is related to her positionality as a researcher in the field, as well as her personal experience of both the joy and ableism related to being a disabled mother. Her sources highlight the intersectional positions of families with a disabled parent, including the dimensions of family type, gender, race, sexuality and different disabilities.
Eva Egermann's selection was shaped by her background in the field of arts, including experiences of ableism in the cultural sphere, which is in many ways dominated by a nondisabled bourgeois class with a habitus of superiority that is inherently ableist. The field of art as an elitist system is changing, but structural ableism remains and needs to be addressed by artists with lived experience of it. Their working conditions are often precarious, and Eva wants to promote the work of disabled artists through our project.
Maria R Palacios chose her sources because of her positionality as a disability justice activist and her work with multiply marginalised communities in different contexts. For her, the connectivity of the survival of human, animal and all other planetary life is central to challenging ableism and fighting the dehumanisation of disabled life that affects particularly the most marginalised disabled people, such as queer disabled people of colour. Maria's own experience is interwoven with these aspects, and she argues for leadership of the most impacted in challenging ableism, for instance through poetry, which also shaped her choice of sources.
Ingrid Palmer's positionality as a Black gender-expansive individual with foster care experience is foundational for her approach to intersectionality, including her choice of sources for the research project and this article. She aims to highlight through her sources how structural, layered, interlocking and overlapping forms of oppression and identity, and nuanced experiences of navigating the world at the intersections of disability, gender, race and class, shape the possibilities of, particularly, disabled women of colour.
Findings: Mapping ableism's intersectionality
Our findings represent the direct voices of the collaborators (Marjorie, Eva E, Maria and Ingrid) and are based on three of our online group meetings, as well as written notes. Marlene and Eva M did not directly participate in these discussions. Rahel facilitated the meetings and documented and summarised the discussions. While she also participated in the discussions and brought stories based on personal experience to them, the aim was to prioritise the stories of the disabled women collaborators in our feminist research group. This is why we centre their voices in presenting our findings. Our findings from mapping the 24 sources are organised around two overarching aspects, Shaping and enforcing intersectional ableism and Surviving and disrupting ableism, with several thematic nuances under each. In our documented discussions, we focused on the positionality of the author(s) and the relevance of each source to understanding ableism and its intersectionality. Many parallels were highlighted, experiences were woven into the discussions and other dimensions of ableism beyond what was immediately addressed in our sources were explored. Our specific discussion of every source could not be included in this article, which is why the following findings and direct quotes should be read as excerpts based on a rich collection of sources that can be accessed in the Supplementary material.
Shaping and enforcing intersectional ableism
Under this aspect, we discussed thematic nuances such as dis/ability hierarchisation, un/marked positions and in/visibility, as well as the double-edged sword of enforcing productivity and practising underestimation. All systematically and purposefully collected sources contributed, from our perspectives, to understanding how ableism is continuously shaped and enforced. In the academic publications that we discussed, ableism was understood as based on other oppressions and/or as the root of other oppressions. In their paper ‘Abolishing innocence’, Ben-Moshe et al. (2021) argue, for instance, that ableism serves as the basis for racism in so-called ethnic adjustment to the protection of people with intellectual disabilities against the death penalty, leading to the execution of more disabled people of colour. Another example is the historical and heavily racialised, classed and gendered construction of ‘the good citizen’ which emerged from our discussion of Mackert's (2019) analysis of calorimetric bodies, and Cherney's (2023) chapter on intersectionality rhetorics. Amongst other things, we discussed (historical) racialisation based on the white body as the standard from which all non-white people deviate: ‘People had the idea that you could figure out your character types from your features in the face, to racially criminalise people. It was the invention of photography as a policing method’ (of meeting 13: lines 610–613). Such eugenic legacy and its de/valuing of life based on specific body features and dis/abilities has been documented through a poignant culture of remembrance, as one of us shared: I was in Hamburg visiting the medical history museum that documented all the medical crimes since the recording of medical science and for the first time in my life I saw all these eugenic scientists’ papers and books. It was a library. I was physically standing in front of this bookshelf. It kind of blew me off. It really affected me […] to see all these books and eugenic literature haptically. I was feeling like this bookshelf was coming off on me and I’m buried underneath it. It was also in the moment where [I thought] I’m now also going to write a dissertation and contribute to this history of ableist scientific knowledge production. (Transcript of meeting 13: lines 832–842)
This was also one of many references throughout our research process that involved the ableism inherent to academia and academic knowledge production. Eugenics and its historical creation of racialised ideas of ablebodiedness highlights ableism's intersectional roots. As many authors writing about ableism have argued, classism, racism and sexism have historically shaped constructions of the able bodymind as bourgeois, male and white (Bailey and Mobley, 2019; Carlson, 2001; Cherney 2023; Wolbring, 2008). In this sense, ableism as a system of oppression which values independence and productivity, and devalues bodies and minds that are considered dependent and unproductive, has many classist, sexist and racist dimensions. At the same time, classist, racist and sexist claims, for instance, that women are too fragile to vote, or that white people are intellectually superior to others, intersect with ableism in the justification of oppression.
We agreed that ableism is profoundly shaped by both a general dis/ability hierarchisation, meaning the valuing and normalisation of certain abilities and bodyminds whilst viewing other abilities as disabilities or certain bodies as disabled, as well as the hierarchisation of different types of disabilities. Dis/ability hierarcharisation was identified in the paper ‘Cripping sport and physical activity’ (Richard et al., 2023), which was then connected to the personal experience of acquired disability: From being able-bodied to disabled, I felt the divide and how I became in a matter of a second sort of unprivileged because I have this notion where, after my disability, I felt like all of a sudden I was relinquished a second-class citizen, still protected by a few of my privileges […] But just the fact that I was in a wheelchair, all of a sudden there are certain things that I wasn't allowed to have access [to]. (Transcript of meeting 14: lines 61–66)
The unquestioned naturalisation of the abled body is a representation of ableist rhetoric (Cherney, 2023): ‘The narration of normal as natural and everything else as deviant and other is, of course, total fiction. […]. There is this phantasma of “normal is natural”. Everything that deviates from this equation is supposedly not normal’ (transcript of meeting 13: lines 231–233). In our discussion, this was then linked to the idea of the normate by Garland-Thomson (1997), which refers to the cultural construction of what is considered normal embodiment. Notions of nondisabled bodyminds as the normate contribute to the hierarchisation of different types of disabilities, with those more conforming to the normate being more privileged and those deviating more being more marginalised and devalued. As an example, the glorification of intelligence was named, elaborating how this can reinforce a lack of cross-disability solidarity: One of the things that we do in oppressed spaces is unfortunately, instead of liberating each other, we tend to oppress each other more. […] how we glorify intelligence, just the very fact that we do that automatically leaves out people […] And it just makes me think how disempowered some disabled people really are just because they’re automatically placed in this bucket of undesirables. […] I myself having grown up disabled, feeling that responsibility of using my intelligence, like you can’t walk, but look how intelligent you are. I grew up in that glorification of intelligence, glorification of academia, glorification of non-normativity when it comes to brains […] In our groups of disabled people we need to call ableism what it is, we need to see it for what it is and recognize the fact that we separate ourselves into groups of this or that, that's so anti-justice. (Transcript of meeting 13: lines 756–775)
This valuing of non-normative abilities at one end of the alleged ‘intelligence’ spectrum is a central part of ableism, and it is highly racialised, as research and many stories of disabled Black people, including within our feminist research group, have pointed out. At the same time, dis/ability hierarchisation is evident in the denial of access to, for instance, queer spaces. Intersections of dis/ability, race and queerness are addressed in the short film Notes from the Underlands by Walden (2019), ‘a very powerful manifesto about resistance, disability justice, the call for access, and talking about a crip queer future that grows in the underlands’ (transcript of meeting 11: lines 746–747). It questions dis/ability hierarchisation by asking: Who says that the abled body is the better body? The same people who say that the hetero body is the better body. The same people who say that the white body is the better body. The same people who say that the cis body is the better body. (Transcript of meeting 11: lines 749–751)
Our intent is neither to equalise dis/ableism with racism, nor to prioritise one over the other, but to emphasise the binary hierarchisation of valued and devalued bodies and how together they shape intersectional notions of the normal, standard body as abled, hetero, white and cis, at least in a European context, where Walden is situated.
While Walden and other sources address ability, hetero, white and cis privilege, in our research group we also discussed less-considered dimensions that shape and enforce intersectional ableism. The paper ‘Big fat inequalities, thin privilege’ (van Amsterdam, 2013) provided a starting point for us to discuss body size and sizeism: Thinness is something that is unmarked because it's just accepted as the norm and healthy standard. If you pass a certain category or definition of weight, where you pass into what's medically considered obese or overweight, that automatically changes how you are treated, how you are perceived, and affects you in every area of your life, in employment, socially, medically. (Transcript of meeting 13: lines 110–116)
Thus, a body considered thin occupies an unmarked position (as long as it is not ‘too thin’), whilst ‘bigger bodies are stigmatised’ (transcript of meeting 13: line 123). Body size and ableism intersect in ‘how we dismiss experiences of people who are in bodies that we don’t consider “normal”, and that goes for both size and functionality’ (transcript of meeting 13: lines 130–132). Then again, sizeism is highly gendered (Van Amsterdam, 2013) and also racialised, for instance within the medical system. Body size is one of the dimensions not initially at the forefront of intersectional discourse, yet we discussed how the continuously evolving concept of intersectionality can be applied to more nuanced intersections of, for instance, body size or, as another example, faith, without marginalising Black women. Unmarked positions in the sense of the privileged position of the dis/ability, gender, class or race binary can also overlap with the invisibility of some disabilities. Yet unmarked positions and invisible disabilities are not the same. Ableism poses specific challenges for people with invisible disabilities, as reported in the paper ‘They can replace you at any time!’ by Berghs et al. (2021), which centres a specific disability primarily affecting people of Black African and Black Caribbean descent. Based on it, we discussed questions of legitimation and deservability: Disabilities that are invisible are then more susceptible to judgement and criticism and difficulty in accessing appropriate services and accommodations, because why is it as humans that we feel that we need to be able to judge for ourselves someone else's deservability of being supported? (Transcript of meeting 13: lines 490–494)
The comment above referred to the issue of credibility regarding the access and support needs of people with, especially invisible, disabilities. The discussion of this continued: Most disabilities that are invisible tend to be episodic. Of course, many of them are still chronic in nature. But episodic disabilities have this component of wellness and illness. So, you have periods where your symptoms are very low or maybe non-existent and you are functioning at your maximum capacity. But these types of disabilities are very unpredictable. You have no way of knowing when you’re going to experience disabling effects again, how long these effects are going to last, how severe they’re going to be. This is a huge part of the work that I do, educating around this because it makes accessing supports very difficult. Employers with their ableist [...] lack of understanding around the need for flexibility in accommodations and supports when it comes to supporting episodic and invisible disabilities. (Transcript of meeting 13: lines 499–512)
Intersectionality and dis/ability hierarchisation shape expectations of productivity, and whilst the normalisation of ablebodiedness as the standard, typical body excludes many disabled people from the labour market, others might fulfil the ability expectations for specific jobs yet are chronically underestimated. This makes productivity and underestimation a double-edged sword, as was the case in an association that one of us made with a personal experience based on the Fellowship report (Toronto Neighbourhood Centres and Palmer, 2022), which is a community-created resource: Nobody would hire me […] they were so afraid of blindness, one employer even told me he would have rather had that I was in a wheelchair than visually impaired and that again shows the hierarchy of disabilities, that there are preferred ones over others. It always came down to liability for employers with me, they were afraid that I would get hurt on the job and then sue them, so nobody was willing to hire me. After several years of this I dropped my university degree and was only using high school [qualification] and I couldn’t even do those jobs because the ones that would accept only high school tended to be ones where I would need my vision. (Transcript of meeting 11: lines 380–389)
Then, an employment opportunity presented itself, that aimed at creating knowledge to support intersectionally disadvantaged people. The Fellowship report itself is relevant to disrupting the ableism of labour market exclusion and stigmatisation and it contains recommendations for anti-oppression and inclusion. From such a perspective of community-created wisdom and knowledge, intersectionality becomes a resource instead of an encumbrance, something that is essential to surviving and disrupting ableism in different areas of life.
Surviving and disrupting ableism
In our discussion, it became clear that challenging and ultimately surviving ableism involved not only antidiscrimination but also joy and community. Surviving intersectional ableist violence was central to our discussions, in relation to both systematically and purposefully collected sources. We discussed the intersectionality of ableist violence, for instance, connected to ‘Ableist shame and disruptive bodies’ by Brown (2017). In this source, ableism is addressed through disabled people's complex relationship with sexuality and gender, which exposes queer and trans disabled people to specific forms of violence such as abusive relationships with caregivers or conversion therapies. In our group, surviving ableism was therefore inevitably intersectional: Ableism is connected in so many ways, at so many levels, that it becomes at some point blurry to differentiate the different oppressions that we are surviving because they all get entangled with one another at the various intersections of our identities and experiences. (Transcript of meeting 13: lines 422–426)
In line with Brown (2017), as well as in relation to the sexual ableism and sex work as addressed by Jones (2022), the denial of sexuality and gender identity to disabled people emerged as an important consideration: When society tends to expect disabled people to not be sexual at all, to not have the ability to feel desire or to even be considered desirable, it is very difficult to even think about queerness in those spaces. Because if you are denied even the ability to identify that you’re a sexual being, then how can we expect for disabled people to be able to identify and claim and honour their own queerness? So, it is about surviving ableism and being able to assert your queer identity. (Transcript of meeting 13: lines 449–454)
Ableism also persists in hegemonic queer and trans spaces, thus disabled people also have to survive ableist violence here. This resonated with the source ‘Queer crip belonging’ (Göncü, 2022), a text in which the author draws from disability activist Talila A Lewis’ (2021a) working definition of ableism which was later slightly revised (Lewis, 2021b). Lewis’ definition centrally refers to the intersectionality of ableism, stating that ableist ideas are ‘deeply rooted in eugenics, anti-Blackness, misogyny, colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism’ and ‘You do not have to be disabled to experience ableism’ (Lewis, 2021b). Göncü's text is then about how ‘people with disabilities are mostly erased, it's about ablebodiedness, heteronormativity’ (transcript of meeting 11: lines 760–761) and ‘an “ableist depiction of the sexual world” where only those who are “able-bodied” and “heterosexual” can access sexual relations’ (Göncü, 2022: 40).
Ableist violence can also come from a place within, including internalised desire to meet the ability expectation of constant productivity, but exhaustion in relation to surviving ableism also applied to the in/ability to fulfil normative racialised gender expectations, as is reflected in one of the videos on Ingrid Palmer's YouTube channel (Palmer, n.d.): ‘It's called A mannish woman and that one is about the intersection of disability, race and gender expectations and it talks about the difficulties of being intersectional and facing different stigmatisation’ (transcript of meeting 11: lines 206–208). This specific video focuses on an incident of assault and the reclaiming of power and self-acceptance through surviving. It was discussed in relation to the paper by Richard et al. (2023), concerning how surviving intersectional ableist violence is often ambiguous: ‘the internalisation of the strong Black woman trope which we use to strengthen ourselves, but it also prevents us from accessing mental health [care], from accepting rest, from admitting to our needs’ (transcript of meeting 14: lines 94–96). The myth of the strong Black woman highlights ableism's intersectionality and has been critically analysed by many Black feminist scholars, but it has only recently been addressed under the aspect of ableism (Bailey and Mobley, 2019).
Surviving intersectional ableist violence is, in times of climate chaos, ultimately a question of daily survival for multiply marginalised disabled people, as addressed in ‘Crip survival networks’ by Palacios and Belzer (2023). They discuss the ableism of the message that disabled people need to ‘be prepared’ for emergencies such as hurricanes: ‘As disabled people, most of us are living in a constant state of survival. Living like that doesn’t allow you the opportunity to prepare’ (Palacios and Belzer, 2023). The intersections of poverty and disability become very evident in the survival struggles of many disabled people: ‘Especially if you’re brown, queer, or undocumented, preparing for a disaster means preparing for the possibility of being left without the very thing you need to move around, to communicate, to breathe’ (Palacios and Belzer, 2023). At the same time, surviving ableism was considered more than just hardship: ‘I have a lot of friends who are disabled and undocumented, and I see them thriving. They’re laughing, they’re joyful, they’re living their lives. They survive because they know they need each other’ (Palacios and Belzer, 2023). Disability joy was also evident in the poem ‘Ableism is’ by Tobi Adebajo (2021a), and another poetic text by the same author called ‘Utter it’ (Adebajo, 2021b), which refers to ‘beautiful brown resistance’ and prompts: ‘Utter it. Because your voice creates waves – templates for living, loving, being’ (Adebajo, 2021b: 32). It is about ‘resistance and silence and finding the voice, speaking your truth into existence’ (transcript of meeting 11: line 775). Together, these two pieces are about both surviving ableism and finding voice.
Related to different emphases in our own activist and advocacy work, challenging ableism through joy, community and positive representation in specific areas of life was important to us, for instance regarding parenting and disability: We don’t have many representations of how parenting is done differently and a model of disabled parenting that is positive. Often if we look at research, we talk about all the disparities and all the discrimination there is. And for me, that is one way to fight ableism by having it a video documentary and not necessarily another piece of research. (Transcript of meeting 9: lines 36–44)
Direct, creative and story-based methods such as video documentaries, podcasts or children's books are important tools to challenge ableism through positive representation. Intersections of gender, race and disability shape the domain of parenting: ‘There's the ideal mother that is portrayed as all-encompassing and you need to be fast, and you need to be providing and there's a lot been written about ableism and motherhood’ (transcript of meeting 9: lines 95–98). Ideals such as so-called intensive motherhood are racialised, and they are often underpinned by interlockings of white supremacy and ablebodiedness. Sources such as the children's book Come Over to My House by Hull and colleagues (2022) disrupt ableist notions of parenting by foregrounding disability joy and family, as well as disability diversity: ‘It's an invitation and that's what I like about this book, an invitation to come and observe and be part of different families’ (transcript of meeting 9: lines 223–224). Disability joy also connects to parenting through creating (a diverse) community of parents in terms of dis/abilities, family types, race, age and gender, as is represented through the source ‘Amplifying voices’, a recording of an online event connecting disabled parents (Aunos et al., 2022). The aim of this event was to show: ‘There is joy in my parenting, but there's also advocacy in my parenting, because I want other people, other women with disabilities to know that they can do it’ (transcript of meeting 9: lines 297–298).
Disability and/or crip community as well as the wisdom that comes with intersectional marginalisation and indeed the concept of intersectionality were highlighted as important resources to resist ableism. Intersectionality as political situatedness as well as a demand is emphasised in the video ‘Let's get intersectional’ (Barzak et al., 2022) from the perspective of women of colour, which is why it was chosen for our sample. The video also implies the message of ‘leadership of the most impacted’ – which is a disability justice principle (Sins Invalid, n.d.) that is highly relevant in terms of creating community and solidarity to survive intersectional ableist violence.
Intersectional ableism everywhere?
The presented findings of our study are all excerpts from our discussion and represent our situated knowledges and stories. They are theory which we collectively created through making sense of our being in the world and with each other (Phillips and Bunda, 2020), along with the sources that we shared and discussed. With this article, we provide insights into ableism's intersectionality, that is how ableism consists of classist, racist and sexist dimensions, and into intersectional ableism, or how ableism intersects with other systems of oppression. By sharing our findings regarding the shaping and enforcing of intersectional ableism as well as surviving and disrupting ableism, we show how ableism has been intersectionally conceptualised in theory, research, activism and artwork so far. Many of the authors of the sources in our sample identify as disabled, queer and/or people of colour, and most did not explicitly address a specific audience. Evidently, authors of academic papers predominantly wrote for an academic audience, while non-academic sources (e.g. films or poems) were more aimed at the general public. Thus, the purpose for which ableism has been conceptualised so far remains (at least) twofold: for advocacy and artivistic, or for academic purposes.
In terms of intersectionality, it was established in our group that: There is no intersection of life without disabled people. We don’t have to look hard for intersectionality because it's right there, because we cannot name a single community anywhere on this planet without disability. It just does not exist. One of the important things that thinking about ableism teaches us is about the unnamed things and unquestioned imagery. (Transcript of meeting 9: lines 246–254)
This was a reminder of what other disability activists have claimed, for instance Baggs (2016), who wrote as the title for a blog post: ‘There is ableism somewhere at the heart of your oppression, no matter what your oppression might be’. Yet ableism has not been addressed as much as other forms of oppression in intersectionality research, which is something that needs to be explored further in the future. The disability justice movement considers intersectionality at the core of their ‘10 principles of disability justice’, with the first principle stating: ‘“We do not live single issue lives” –Audre Lorde. Ableism, coupled with white supremacy, supported by capitalism, underscored by heteropatriarchy, has rendered the vast majority of the world “invalid”’ (Sins Invalid, n.d.). Other than – and yet always interconnected with – intersectionality, many aspects of our current study related to the 10 disability justice principles, such as sustainability or collective liberation. We have now begun to engage more deeply with the disability justice principles in the ableism research project.
Another issue we continue to address in our feminist research group is the ableism of academia and academia-led research. It is our understanding that ableism in its activist and theoretical underpinnings helps to name the oppression produced within and through academic structures. As one of us declared in our discussion: ‘I’m really in favour of claiming this [the oppressive dynamic of academic knowledge production] is ableism and also introducing this term as an analytical terminology because it's also a radical concept’ (transcript of meeting 13: lines 855–856). Part of challenging the ableist logics of academia (and its limitations from a position within) is the sharing of our findings beyond academia and research publishers such as this journal. We want to make our research available and accessible to a broader audience and diverse communities, and continue asking ourselves: Have we added something different or outside of that [academic] structure that is working towards increasing respect for research that is conducted not by formal researchers [but] by impacted community so that we are contributing to the valuation of community research? (Transcript of meeting 15: lines 481–484)
At the same time, our aim with this article is to contribute to feminist theory, Gender Studies and Intersectionality Studies through our discussion of different sources on ableism and our associations with them, bringing attention to ableism as the system of oppression that shapes unquestioned notions of the normal bodymind.
We note that ableism is sometimes understood differently from an intersectional perspective in different sources, with some not differentiating between ableism and disablism, for instance, and others not centring race/racism or white supremacy, as many scholars consider fundamental for intersectionality as a theory and movement. In addition, we found a variety of different perspectives on the connection of ableism and intersectionality, with some viewing ableism as the basis of every form of oppression and others viewing ableism as inevitably intersectional. Thus, there is not a singular way in which ableism is conceptualised intersectionally in academic, activist and artistic contexts, but a plurality of positions and considerations. Within our feminist research group, there also exists a spectrum of perspectives regarding the various connections of ableism and intersectionality. This is why we have added a question mark to the heading of our conclusion ‘Intersectional ableism everywhere?’. We nevertheless share the belief that the many interlockings of structural and identity aspects of privilege and oppression based on ideas of ab/normal bodies and de/valued abilities are best addressed through considering ableism in its intersectional roots, effects and meanings.
Ultimately, we suggest to other feminist theorists, activists and artists to incorporate ableism into their work, engage in self-reflection and consider how better understanding ableism from an intersectional perspective may help to resist their own bias and innate ableism. Everyone has internalised hegemonic systems of hierarchy and oppression to some extent and ableism can seem particularly subtle and thus difficult to identify. Learning from (feminist) disability studies and disability justice communities is therefore vital to challenge ableism. Engaging with ableism should be part of every feminist, women's and gender studies curriculum, every feminist movement and social justice context. Too often, disabled people have been forgotten or marginalised in the feminist struggle and in intersectionality research, and disability studies and the disability rights movement were in turn long dominated by white male perspectives. As stated in the disability justice principles, collective liberation is necessary: ‘No body or mind can be left behind – only moving together can we accomplish the revolution we require’ (Sins Invalid, n.d.).
While we want readers to recognise the adverse and detrimental impacts of intersectional oppression, we also emphasise the power and the strength rooted in intersectionality. Disability as experiential background is not limited to discrimination – it comes with joy, growth and various skills and abilities, for instance meeting challenges creatively, strengthened by crip wisdom. Disability will always be there; it is an ever-present part of human life beyond the meaning given to it by the neoliberal imperative of independence and self-sufficiency. With understanding ableism comes responsibility to dismantle it and become an ally to disabled people. Ableism does not only exist in the lives of disabled people, in its intersectionality with other forms of oppression it is undeniable and affects the way society is shaped as a whole. Becoming aware is not enough; if we want to honour the political social movement aspects that come with an intersectional approach to ableism, we have to aim at structural change too.
Supplemental Material
sj-docx-1-fty-10.1177_14647001261435522 - Supplemental material for Mapping ableism's intersectionality: Insights from a feminist research group
Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-fty-10.1177_14647001261435522 for Mapping ableism's intersectionality: Insights from a feminist research group by Rahel More, Marjorie Aunos, Eva M. Egermann, Maria R. Palacios, Ingrid Palmer, Marlene Krubner, and Eva Michl in Feminist Theory
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We want to acknowledge Embla Guðrúnard Ágústsdóttir who was a collaborator for the research project Ableism, the dis/ability binary and beyond until 2024.
Consent for publication
All authors have approved of the final version of the manuscript and gave their consent for publication of all included quotes and data material.
Consent to participate
Authors 2–5 who are collaborators on the research project Ableism, the dis/ability binary and beyond have provided informal letters of collaboration and declared their readiness to be part of the project.
Data availability statement
The datasets generated and/or analysed during the current study are publicly available here: https://doi.org/10.11587/YX7NXN
Ethical considerations
The present study received ethical approval from the ethics board of the University of Vienna, Austria, in 2023. Reference nr. 01060.
Funding
This research was funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) under grant [10.55776/ESP414].
Supplemental material
Supplemental material for this article is available online.
Notes
References
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