Ethiopian disabled women’s experiences of intimacy, pregnancy and motherhood are reported. Qualitative, in-depth, and semi-structured interviews along with personal observations were used to explore the full experiences of participants. Interview data revealed that mothers experienced significant challenges with regard to accessibility of health centers, physician’s lack of knowledge about and problematic attitudes toward them and more general societal prejudices towards individuals with disability. The 13 participants were employed women with physical or visual disabilities, and the interviewees were from the Addis Ababa metropolitan area, Ethiopia.
The central aim of this anthology of papers is to consider the place of law in political, social, scientific and biomedical developments relating to disability and other categories of ‘abnormality’. The papers consider how categories of abnormality relate to the privileged and frequently unmarked position of ‘normality’ and how legal interventions in abnormality relate to existing normative designations in the dominant cultural imaginary. This collection of papers has a range of disciplinary approaches
Paper titles:
Fit or fitting in: deciding against normal when reproducing the future
Eccentricity: the case for undermining legal categories of disability and normalcy
Eugenics and the normal body: the role of visual images and intelligence testing in framing the treatment of people with disabilities in the early twentieth century
The construction of access: the eugenic precedent of the Americans with Disabilities Act
Disability and torture: exception, epistemology and ‘black sites’
Mental capacity and states of exception: revisiting disability law with Giorgio Agamben
Not just language: an analysis of discursive constructions of disability in sentencing remarks
Policing normalcy: sexual violence against women offenders with disability
‘The government is the cause of the disease and we are stuck with the symptoms’: deinstitutionalisation, mental health advocacy and police shootings in 1990s Victoria
Disruptive, dangerous and disturbing: the ‘challenge’ of behaviour in the construction of normalcy and vulnerability
Making the abject: problem-solving courts, addiction, mental illness and impairment
Cripwashing: the abortion debates at the crossroads of gender and disability in the Spanish media
‘Figurehead’ hate crime cases: developing a framework for understanding and exposing the ‘problem’ with ‘disability’
Continuum
Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, Vol.31, No.3, pp. 337-340
This paper puts forward an argument in favour of careful and critical analysis of culture in formulating communication strategies with and for specific groups, based on experience drawn from the Clown Project in Guatemala and other countries in Central America. The Clown Project uses labour-intensive face-to-face street theatre and dialogue, participatory workshops, and symbolic communication such as print-based material to reach those most vulnerable to the spread and impact of HIV and AIDS . The analysis takes into account relations of power within and between vulnerable groups, examining the centre-periphery dynamic between classes, genders, ethnicities, age groups, and other social identities. Both appropriately supported insider perspectives and appropriately processed outsider knowledge are recommended, along with ways of bridging science and the field, theory and practice