The Social Invisibilization Of Femininity And Social Unacceptability

Further, the abnormal body comes to signify absence of femininity and social unacceptability, since subjectivity is so deeply intertwined with embodiment in patriarchal society. At an experiential level, the social invisibilization of femininity informed by a “defective” body prompt women with disabilities to long for the roles of wives and mothers that their abled-bodied feminists problematize and critique as oppressive. On the other hand sexual objectification gives way to asexual objectification, frustrating normal sexual needs and aspirations, and consigning the woman with a disability to a life of social isolation. Consequently a core component of normative construction of femininity is the woman as caregiver in procreative and maternal roles, but reality indicates that woman with a disability is in need of care herself. Further, powerlessness of women with disabilities within the bio-medical framework has risen, their needs are either invisiblized or predefined for them by non-disabled feminists or by men with disabilities.

In order to put into perspective the relationship between feminism and disability, it is important to bear in mind a

Instead it points to the ways in which women are themselves constrained by the burden of a particular kind of knowingness of a disabled body. The ideal scenario might be that women should avoid selections. However, it is unjust to expect that they would not abort when the problem is not a matter of autonomous choice, but the context in which such choice is made. Feminist engagement should assert that this “choice” does not entail agency as the structure within which this choice is being produced, is highly marked by centrality of modern science and patriarchal ideologies. There is no agency outside as well as inside such a