Autoanalysis, with particular reflections on sociology

This article aims to contribute to a sociology of knowledge via an autoanalysis of a marginalised member of the British upper-middle class, who moved first from the South to the North of England and then from England to Scottish society as an immigrant: a ‘stranger who stayed’. Written in the first person, Bridget Fowler’s reflections move between different religious and political worlds, focusing especially on her reception of conflicting sociological theories and her own development through these. Influenced by five exceptionally learned and lucid sociologists – John Rex, Herminio Martins, Raymond Williams, Pierre Bourdieu and Terry Lovell – she has spent her sociological career contributing to the demystification of power in various forms. In particular she has focused on the significance of secular culture – notably literature – in creating hegemonic domination. She has also analysed the role of symbolic revolutions in social transformation, avoiding in this respect falling either into idealism or simplistic class reductionism. Arguing that sociological theory still needs to teach Marx, Weber and Durkheim, these founding figures should not be seen as creating – in social scientific terms – a unified architectural construction, but should be read with and against one another; further, they need also to be combined with other, more contemporary, influences. Finally whilst noting the existential salience of movements around identity – nation, gender, sexuality and disability – she argues that the discipline must continue to reach out ‘beyond the fragments’, to address social totalities more broadly, including wider issues of social space and structures of power.

Disabled Women, Care Regimes, and Institutionalised Homophobia: a Case Study From Poland

Introduction The intersection of non-heterosexuality, gender, and disability became a prolific field of research among both queer, crip, and disability studies scholars, though focusing mainly on Western regions. In the paper discusses how women narrate their experiences in relation to ableist and heteronormative regimes in the context of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). The case study of Poland, a country characterized by institutionalization, lack of individualized disability support, and state homophobia contributes to a growing body of research on non-western sexuality and disability studies. Methods We conducted interviews with 11 non-heterosexual disabled women living in Poland. Results By tackling care regimes, our analysis explores women’s experiences in the context of discursive confusions resulting from being at the intersection of often-contradictory local narrations on gender, disability, and sexuality. We identified three intertwined processes to understand how care regimes work in Poland: (1) the separateness between queer and disabled policies and discourses, (2) the coopting/obscuring of homosexual relations between women by category of care, and (3) familiarisation of care and its consequences for non-heterosexuality. Policy Implication We suggest that social support systems must better address the needs of non-heterosexual women with disabilities which are profoundly impacted by structural, political, and cultural constraints and possibilities.

Crip Theory

Crip theory began to flourish in the interdisciplinary fields of disability studies and queer theory in the early decades of the 21st century. These fields attend to the complex workings of power and normalization in contemporary cultures, particularly to how institutions of modernity have materialized and sedimented a distinction between “normal” and “abnormal” and to how subjects deemed “abnormal” have contested such ideas. Disability studies pluralizes models for thinking about disability: if a culture of normalization reduces disability to lack or loss and positions disability as always in need of cure, disability studies challenges the singularity of this medical model. Disability studies scholars examine how able-bodied ideologies emerge in and through representation, and how such representations result in a culture of ableism that invalidates disabled experiences. Crip theory, in turn, emerged as a particular mode of doing disability studies, deeply in conversation with queer theory. The pride and defiance of queer culture, with its active reclamation or reinvention of language meant to wound, are matched by the pride and defiance of crip culture. Crip theory, however, is generatively paradoxical, working with and against identity and identification simultaneously. Crip theory affirms lived, embodied experiences of disability and the knowledges (or cripistemologies) that emerge from such experiences; at the same time, it is critical of the ways in which certain identities materialize and become representative to the exclusion of others that may not fit neatly within dominant vocabularies of disability. Many works in crip theory focus on the supposed margins of disability identification as well as on the intersections where gender, race, sexuality, and disability come together. Crip theory, additionally, offers an analytic that can be used for thinking about contexts or historical periods that do not seem on the surface to be about disability at all. Cripping offers a critical process, considering how certain bodily or mental experiences, in whatever location or period, have been marginalized or invisibilized, made pathological or deviant. Within queer theory, crip theory thus perhaps has its deepest affinity with queer of color critique, with its attention not just to substantive identities but also to processes of racialization and gendering that pathologize or make aberrant particular groups. Queer theory, queer of color critique, and crip theory, moreover, often combine studies that focus on a macrolevel recognition of the complex workings of political economy (neoliberal capitalism, in particular) and the seemingly microlevel vicissitudes of identity, embodiment, or desire.

Queer/Disabled Existence: Human Rights of People with Disability

Literature has always portrayed the queer/disabled people as the Other. People with disabilities and queer sexualities are generally subject of ridicule and abuse. Historically literature has aided in the social constructionism of disability phenomena in the society by depicting the disabled as something nocuous and undesirable. Furthermore, traditional representations of queer and/or disabled existence have always been biased and are usually about how the ‘able-bodied’ or the so-called ‘normal’ people perceive people with diverse forms of the body and queer sexualities. Yet it has been conspicuously silent as regards the plight of the people with disabilities and queer sexualities. However, in a departure from traditional representations of queer and/or disabled existence, Firdaus Kanga presents a first-hand account of the lived experiences of his precarious life in the Indian socio-cultural context and beyond. He has to his credit a series of critically acclaimed books such as Trying to Grow (1990), Heaven on Wheels (1991), The Godmen (1995), and The Surprise Ending (1996). As a severely disabled individual suffering from a crippling disease called Osteogenesis Imperfecta (brittle bones disease) Trying to Grow (1990), a semi-autobiographical novel, is a narrative of his lived experiences of disability and tryst with queer sexuality. While his other work, Heaven on Wheels (1991) is a discourse on queer sexuality and disability from the perspective of queer and disabled existence. Kanga critiques the ableist society’s treatment of the queer and the disabled which is tantamount to Human Rights abuse.