Imagining a Feminist Disability Geography: from bathroom access to prison abolition

Keywords: disability studies, feminist geography, Medical Industrial Complex
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 05:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 06:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 13

Abstract

As disability is being taken up by a wider range of critical geographers, it is important for feminist geographers to collectively imagine a myriad of potential futurities of this integration—what are the responsibilities, commitments, or principles of them, and how do we do the work now needed to ensure these futures? Or, how is a feminist disability geography articulated? A feminist disability geography might explicate the implicit (dis)ability in current feminist geographic work but cannot stop here. In this paper, I contend that integrating feminist disability studies’ critical approaches into feminist geographic scholarship not only broadens the scope of feminist geographic research but also necessitates the transformation of how we create space and access each day. That is, it must start from a situated understanding of one’s position in a university or a related institution and its (physical and power) structures as a) in part reproduced through the system of (dis)ability b) inextricably entangled with the many sites of the Medical Industrial Complex that propel surveillance, incarceration, and displacement. Accordingly, building on intimate accounts of being witness and subject to ableism in academia and on crip practices, I argue for some initial tenets for one envisioned feminist disability geography that remains committed to a disability politic and, consequently, an abolitionist perspective.