Impaired Bodies, Gendered Lives: Everyday Realities of Disabled Women explores the intersections of gender and disability. Situating disabled women in their local contexts and using an ethnographic approach, this book also provides a review of empirical literature on disabled women, both globally and in India. It seeks, hence, to illustrate how global gendered structures influence practices of gender and ability in specific communities. The lives of disabled women remain entrenched in gendered regimes within families, communities and public spaces, though the agency demonstrated by these women in defining themselves as women and negotiating gendered spaces is remarkable. Keeping this in mind, the present volume steers a balance between a sound academic understanding of the issues of gender and disability, and the involved care of a feminist disability activist. Finally, it attempts to meld the wider challenges of feminist theory, developed both nationally and internationally, with a more immediate understanding of the centrality of gender in the Bengali cultural milieu that percolates down to the remotest.
This volume will be of key interest to the rapidly growing fields of Disability and Gender Studies respectively. Simultaneously, it is bound to also appeal to scholars of Sociology, Cultural Studies, Literature, and will of lasting interest to all those government and non-government organizations which are working towards understanding and addressing concerns of persons with disability.