Disability, Gender and the Trajectories of Power is a collection of articles written by authors and activists working on the larger issues of disability and gender. The volume makes a valid argument for considering rights of disabled women from an intersecting lens and advocates for a two-pronged action to be taken up both in terms of inclusion in policy and eradication of exclusion and stigma from the lives of women with disabilities. The book is divided into three sections that speak to one another in terms of academic and advocacy content. They point to different levels of engagement with the issue at hand—from using existing data to elaborate the poor status of women with disabilities to highlighting the lack of gender-disaggregated data, from illustrating personal experiences of restrictions faced by disabled women in India to interrogating the gendered nature of discrimination faced by disabled women in different realms of life, from engaging with notions of motherhood to elaborating experiences of care.
In the introduction Asha Hans points towards the need for gendering the disability framework as gender inequality and injustice enters lives of women with disabilities in many ways. Highlighting the nascent field of Feminist Disability Studies in India, the book points to the need for more transformative research to bring in evidence-based data. The book successfully makes the case for advocacy to ensure more evidence-based research on the status of disabled women and using the research findings for further advocacy. The normative foundations of democracy, although espousing equality of all citizens, often ignore the ways in which different identity-markers can confound the access to justice of different marginalized groups. In this volume, all articles explore the intersections of gender and disability with the present socio-cultural and political framework to interrogate not just access to justice but also the very framework of gender and disability politics.
The articles in the book speak to one another, from the way in which the editor has grouped them into sections but also in the way there are commonalities across sections within the book itself. The engagement with rights cuts across—not just the rights of all persons with disabilities, but within impairment categories, different disabilities and the issues around social interpretations of different conditions, especially those with intellectual impairments and psycho-social disabilities; rights of all kinds and not just civil-political rights, but also the right to legal capacity, right to work and right to live in the community; rights of other groups implicated in the lives of disabled people—of mothers and of families, too. The common binding thread is also the analytical frame—interrogating sociological and structural forms of oppression resulting in systemic discrimination and latent violence. Using both patriarchy and ableism as directional contexts, the articles connect intersections—gender and disability with families, labour, social inclusion, education in various ways.