Chapter “Fearing That I Could Literally Die”

Overview & Synopsis

The Routledge International Handbook of Feminist Disability Studies captures how discussions about disability have progressed since the 1990s, as well as grappling with the new debates over bodies and autonomy that are dominating various media today. Providing newly written chapters by scholars from both the global north and the global south, this book offers a mix of experiential, creative, and progressive content, combined with theoretical and political commentaries, to provide an eclectic and holistic immersion in feminist disability scholarship. It covers topics as diverse as societal barriers; access to public spaces; neurodiversity, activism; hate crime, bullying and ridicule; media and cultural analyses and representations of disabled women; structural issues such as poverty, policy and their relation to care/autonomy; mothering, both in terms of access to reproductive care and the re-emergence of eugenics, and care ethics of mothering disabled people; and madness, personality disorder and the provocations of the medical model, in terms of the imperative for ‘cure’ or ‘recovery’. This collection will be of interest to all scholars and students of Disability Studies, feminism, social work, cultural studies, human geography media, media studies and sociology. Chapter 15 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 licence.