Entering the world of disability eleven years ago as a young woman, age 22, was a shock to me. I became paralyzed from the waist down from a car accident in September of 2000. The manner in which I became disabled meant that between one second and the next I became paralyzed, and I entered a world that seemed more like Alice in Wonderland than any kind of reality I knew. I could write pages and pages about the strangeness of that experience (and I probably will, someday), but what I want to talk about today is how it feels to be a woman with a disability.
Being both female and having a disability, I am in double jeopardy; I encounter both sexism and ablism. In fact, sexism towards women with disabilities tends to be amplified because certain stereotypes of women – weak, childlike – mirror stereotypes of disability. So instead of double jeopardy, let’s make that triple jeopardy; being a woman with a disability has its own flavor, separate from the experience of either being a woman or having a disability alone. It’s like mixing red and blue paint together: what you get is not red and blue all mixed up, but purple – something new entirely. Part of that new dynamic for women with disabilities is rolelessness. Rolelessness refers to the idea that women with disabilities are often seen as being exempt from certain gender roles, specifically expectations about motherhood and about sexuality.
Let’s look at motherhood. Women with disabilities are perceived as weak and unable to care for themselves. This leads many to see these women as unfit for motherhood; after all, how could she take care of a child when she can’t take care of herself? How could she teach a child when she can’t even think for herself and make her own decisions? These attitudes, unfortunately, have dire consequences, and I’m not just talking about rude comments and looks. Women with disabilities are more likely to lose custody of their children after divorce than women without disabilities; they also have more difficulty when it comes to getting reproductive information, and even when attempting to foster or adopt children.
Another insidious stereotype about disability and motherhood is the idea that the woman will pass the disability on to her child. First off, the majority of disabilities are not genetic, so this fear is mostly unfounded. Secondly, some people with disabilities feel that passing on their disability to their child would not be the end of the world; many able-bodied people find this idea to be cruel. It is my belief that some able-bodied people feel this way because they are mostly ignorant of the day-to-day experience of living with disability, and they tend to assume that it is all hospitals, pain, limitations, and ridicule. While these things do exist in the lives of many people with disabilities, there is also joy, and laughter, and light, and love. In fact, it is my belief that many people with disabilities tend to feel these things in a deeper way than many able-bodied people (sorry), precisely because of the difficult things they go through. And finally, although people may feel that a person with a disability should not have children, that attitude must not be put into action; this country already has an ugly history of forced sterilization, and we do not need to revisit it.
Women with disabilities, in addition to having their mothering skills held in question, are often assumed to be asexual. While I do not have children and cannot speak personally about disability and motherhood, sexual stereotypes are something I can talk about. When I became injured I was a 22-year-old woman who walked a lot because I usually didn’t have a vehicle; this meant that I had extensive experience with street harassment. I could go on and on about the whistles, the catcalls, the slowing down of cars, the bursts of taunting laughter that came from groups of young men hanging out on the sidewalks, watching women. But when I went around town in my wheelchair…I tell you, it was so strange that at first I couldn’t figure out what was different. But something was definitely off. Then I finally realized it: there was absolutely no street harassment. I had become so used to it, having been experiencing it since I was thirteen that it had become white noise to me, and when it was turned off it took me a little while to realize what was missing. It was fascinating and saddening at the same time. I had not felt the freedom to walk down the sidewalk without the fear or experience of being harassed since I was a child. At the same time, I knew why I was not being paid attention to, and that hurt. Men no longer harassed me on the street, which was fine with me; but they also no longer flirted, not even my friends. I remember being in a bar not long after my accident and seeing a guy I thought was cute, so I tried to catch his eye to give him a look. After a while I realized that not only was he not meeting my eyes, but he was also very deliberately looking anywhere but at me. I had dropped off the sexual radar. As a young, somewhat wild-spirited woman, this was hard for me to take. It’s taken me many years, and lots of therapy, for me to get to a point where I know that I am a sexual being and that that is alright, even if wider society tells me every day that I am not and if I try to be then, well, that is just wrong.
And in a final mashup of ignorant attitudes about sexuality, motherhood and disability, I have read many an anecdote where an able-bodied person sees a woman with a physical disability who is pregnant and exclaims, in surprise and shock, “I didn’t know you could have sex!” For some people, the idea of a woman with a disability having sex is gross or funny; for others, it’s something they simply have never even thought about. Either way, this has got to change. It’s all wound up in expectations about sexuality and the way the female body should look. Being a woman with a disability is a unique challenge, one that needs to be paid attention to by both the disability community and the feminist community. Otherwise we are caught in the middle, left to face these challenges in limbo alone.