With 1.3 billion people (and growing) living with a disability around the world, exploring the “link between health and disability” has never been more important in the context of a neoliberal order that prioritizes “competition and physical optimization,” writes the Austrian journal. ROMIn: A European Review of Feminist History. But what is a “disability”?
In recent decades, the focus has shifted from understanding disability as unique to the individual to viewing disability as “the result of interactions between the body, person, and environment.” A distinction is now made between impairment, which is a physical or biological condition of a person, and disability caused by social barriers that prevent people with disabilities from living independent lives.
These barriers can take many forms, including “government intervention, social norms, institutional regulations, or practical obstacles such as lack of support (financial, medical, or psychological), lack of integration, or even demonization or criminalization.”
The History of Disability explores how these barriers have changed over time, specifically how disability has been historically constructed as deviance. Feminist disability studies takes an intersectional approach, based on the observation that disability studies and gender studies both center on power relations and inequalities.
The articles in this issue are ROM Examining disability from the perspective of women’s and gender history, the book uses a variety of examples to demonstrate how the boundaries between body, society, and discourse shift and how disability takes on very different faces.
early modern misogyny
Early modern witch persecution was shaped by “paranoia, mania or depression, and the relationship between witchcraft and gender,” writes Claudia Opitz-Belakar. The 16th century physician Johann Weyer was one of the first to propose a link between witchcraft and madness, arguing that accused witches were not criminals but “melancholy old women who could not control their senses.” Based on humoral medicine, he argued that postmenopausal women are particularly susceptible to melancholy and demonic fantasies due to the predominance of “black bile.” He argued that he simply needed proper religious instruction, not execution.
Weyer’s contemporary, the legal scholar Jean Bodin, rejected this defense, portraying witches as deliberately corrupt and arguing that women gave themselves up to the devil out of weakness and greed. These conflicting interpretations intersected with broader misogynistic stereotypes in which women were seen as more “gullible, superstitious, and easily induced” than men.
Although Weyer intended to alleviate the persecution by portraying older women as “pathetic,” his medicalized image of the melancholic crone reinforced the association with femininity, irrationality, and evil, creating an understanding of melancholy as a precursor to Satanism that ultimately contributed to the persecution and execution of thousands of women. “Mental distress and illness therefore became a mortal threat and disability in the most extreme form for those affected.”
fascism and disability
Dagmar Herzog situates the history of disability within the history of sexuality, gender, and eugenics, arguing that the debate around disability is also about social values and national identity, stating that “bullying of the weak has always been a feature of fascism.” While the history of contraception and abortion “cannot be discussed in isolation from the rise of eugenics,” the Holocaust itself was deeply connected to the persecution of people with disabilities.
Herzog is particularly interested in the “obviously powerful appeal of eugenics despite its inadequate scientific premises” and the persistence of discriminatory attitudes toward disabled people long after 1945. Raymond Williams’ concept of “emotional structures” can help explore the “emotional complexity” of disorders without which “we can’t really understand anything.”
The focus is on the relationship between gender and disability. Although the Nazis sterilized an equal number of men and women, the effects on women were often worse because motherhood was considered an “essential aspect of femininity.” More fundamentally, gendered ideas about ‘fitness for work’ and sexuality shaped who was considered valuable and who was seen as expendable. After all, “a society where people with disabilities are treated with consideration and respect is also a society where reproductive rights and sexual self-determination are the norm.”
Age and (in)ability
Although not a disability, aging can also be usefully examined through the lens of ability (inability). Denitsa Nentscheva shows how in socialist Bulgaria, “the aging of the population is becoming a national challenge.” “It required…the effective, normative, and ideological construction of a social space for the elderly.” The official discourse in government-published medical journals reinforced “the rich narrative of social policies and goods that the state provides to its citizens,” while at the same time placing the “responsibility” on individuals to remain productive members of society into old age.
Although socialist ideology promoted gender equality, older men and women continued to be shaped by deeply gendered expectations regarding work, emotional behavior, and family responsibilities. Even discussions about marriage and spiritual life in old age were framed by state-centered ideas of collective welfare. Marriage in later life was positioned as socially beneficial, psychologically hygienic, and rooted in companionship rather than sexuality. Discourses on aging and late marriage functioned as “regulatory tools to negotiate the boundaries of desire, care, and autonomy in old age, while reaffirming the gendered moral order that underpins the socialist vision of a healthy, productive, and governable population.”
family and the far right
Out of focus, analyzing the role of the family in the Austrian identitarian movement, Judith Goetz writes that the “heteronormative and indigenous” family is seen on the far right as “a haven where traditional values are protected from social change.”
Although groups like Identitarians have modernized their ideology and language through social media strategies and concepts such as “ethnic pluralism,” their understanding of family remains traditional and patriarchal. The white nuclear family is presented as a “central pillar of society” and an important mechanism for maintaining ethnic and cultural continuity against perceived threats such as immigration, queer identity, and liberal modernity.
The family is portrayed as “both a threat and a source of salvation” and is exploited in a “rhetoric of scandalization and crisis.” On the one hand, white families are victims of multiculturalism and gender delusions, and inclusive education and LGBTQ+ visibility are framed as forms of “indoctrination” that threaten the “natural” order. On the other hand, the family is imagined as a solution to population decline, and women are encouraged to have more children to resist the so-called “Great Replacement.”
Review by Cadenza Academic Translations
Source: Eurozine – www.eurozine.com
