GWS 10 Study Guide - Quiz Guide: Plastic Surgery, Feminist Theory, Disability Studies

• School: Berkeley
• Department: Gender And Women's Studies
• Course: GWS 10
• Professor: Barbara Barnes

Document Summary

Gws 10 integrating disability, transforming feminist theory garland-thomson. Main point: integrating disability as a category of analysis deepens, expands, and challenges feminist theory. Disability studies examines the identity disabled in the service of integrating people with disabilities more fully into our society. Feminist theory is a collaborative, interdisciplinary inquiry and cultural critique that interrogates how systems of gender, race, ethnicity, ability, sexuality, and class construct, inflect, and contradict one another. Disability is not a natural state of inferiority or misfortune. It is a system for interpreting bodily variations. It is a relationship between bodies and their environments. It is set of practices that produce both the able-bodied and the disabled. Intensely normatively feminine positions are aligned with negative attitudes about people with disabilities; women are assigned a cluster of ascriptions that mark them as other. Women, the disabled, and people of color are always ready occasions for the aggrandizement of benevolent rescuers, whether strong males, distinguished doctors, abolitionists, etc.