Gender and Disability: Discovering Women Enabled International
By Tyler Burrell
We’ve witnessed huge leaps in the feminist movement over the last few decades. More recently, the movement has become aware of the importance of intersectionality, or understanding how interconnected social categorizations (such as race, class, and religion) work together to form systems of privilege and discrimination. One such intersection is gender and disability, as women and girls with disabilities often face multi-layered forms of discrimination and abuse.
Recently, I was asked to do a project requiring research into an NGO of my choice for a Global Gender Policy graduate class. As a disabled woman myself, I was thrilled to discover Women Enabled International (WEI), a non-profit organization that advances the rights of women and girls with disabilities all around the world, tackling issues like health and reproductive rights, violence against women, and conflict and humanitarian emergencies.
I contacted the organization and had the opportunity to speak with Virginia Ossana, Communications and Programs Advisor at WEI, and ask her a few questions on the disability rights movement and the work of WEI.
Tyler: WEI works to advance human rights at the intersection of gender and disability. Why is an intersectional approach essential to the solution of global issues?
Virginia: It is essential because it ensures that these solutions truly leave no one behind. We are accustomed to seeing women-centered responses and disability-centered responses, but where do these leave those of us who are living at exactly the intersecting point? We are neither here nor there, and so our needs go unmet and our rights are not respected. We need an intersectional approach to ensure we can exercise our rights fully.
Tyler: When I speak to others in the disabled community, many remark that it can feel like disability rights get swept under the rug in favor of other movements. Do you think disability rights generally receive less attention than other advocacy areas, such as race, gender, or reproductive rights? If so, why do you think this is the case?
Virginia: It is difficult to quantitatively measure the amount of attention that the disability movement receives compared to other movements … I think part of that is related to the fact that disabled people have historically been silenced and there have been many an obstacle preventing us from speaking up. Even so, the disability movement has been growing stronger and stronger in the last decades, particularly in the last few years, where young people have started really changing the face of disability advocacy and activism, with the likes of Imani Barbarin or Alex Dacy taking it to social networks to dispute and debunk traditional narratives around disability. From the WEI perspective, it is also difficult to think of the disability movement as an isolated compartment. Movements are not -or at least should not- be in competition for attention. For us, the answer lies in working across movements.
Tyler: Ableism is a form of discrimination that runs rampant not only throughout general society, but also within the feminist movement. What are some steps those within the movement can take to ensure that disabled women’s voices are heard?
Virginia: Ensuring accessibility is a good place to start. Many times, feminist events do not take into account the needs of disabled feminists, and that hinders our participation in the movement. It should be noted that accessibility is much more than just setting up ramps, which some people need. Ensuring accessibility also means providing Communication Access Realtime Translation [CART], sign language interpretation, easy-read versions of documents, graphic designs with appropriate fonts, sizes and contrasts. The world of accessibility is vast and wide, so the first thing is to do some research and ask disabled people for our input. A second more complex step is to change ableist attitudes that regard disabled women only as disabled, as if our place was only in an isolated disability movement. Feminism needs to understand that disabled women are women, too.
It’s not just about creating physical space in which disabled women can comfortably exist; it’s also about reframing our understanding of disabled women to include us as feminine, sexual and with an identity beyond our disability.
WEI has accomplished a lot of great work for the feminist and disability rights movements, and they’re currently working on United Nations advocacy, including leading one of the Action Coalitions of the Generation Equality Forums, responding to COVID-19 at the intersection of gender and disability, and creating what they call “AcountABILITY Toolkits” to help empower advocates to use available U.N. human rights mechanisms, and they are also uplifting the voices of people living at the intersection of gender and disability in Rewriting the Narrative.
About the author:
Tyler Burrell (she/her) is a disabled graduate student at George Washington University studying Security Policy Studies and Global Gender Policy. She uses social media as a means to normalize disability, is a member of The D.C. Student Consortium on Women, Peace, and Security (WPS), and currently advocates for the inclusion of disability studies in international affairs at the Elliott School. You can follow her on Instagram as @forevertyler15.
