ABSTRACT
The meanings of disability and gender are taken for granted in dominant Western contexts. Both are presumed to be the inevitable consequence of “bodymind” characteristics. However, just as feminist theory questions the taken-for-grantedness of gender, disability studies advance a critical approach to disability that denaturalizes and politicizes it. Within disability studies, the meaning of the concept and lived experience of disability is not understood to be an inevitable, unmediated result of bodymind impairment. Instead, disability studies theorizes disability as an important social category whose contingent meanings are forged, negotiated, and transformed within a cauldron of lived experience and relationships, conceptual and built architectures, normalizing ideologies, and the globalized uneven distribution of life chances. Disability studies scholars posit disability as a critical concept with which to imagine and create a theory and politics aimed at social, political, and economic justice.
