Abstract
This chapter explores the ways in which women with locomotor disabilities experience their impaired bodies and strive to adhere, as far as possible, to the socially acceptable ideas about femininity and ability. Socialized into gendered sociocultural ideologies, disabled girls come to realise and accept their differences from other able-bodied girls, within families, in the neighbourhood and at school. Disabled women discipline and survey their own bodies by engaging in practices which produce their own bodies according to the dictates of idealized normative construction of feminine embodiment. This chapter is based on empirical data collected through qualitative techniques of ethnography, including in-depth interviewing and case studies of sixteen women with disabilities living in the districts of 24 Parganas (S) and Kolkata in West Bengal.
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Notes
- 1.
Good girl used in sense of functional capacity as well as moral uprightness.
- 2.
A kind of slender cigarette rolled in a tree-leaf.
- 3.
Parched rice.
- 4.
Makeshift structures made of bamboos and covered with cloth where idols of gods are kept for a brief period.
- 5.
Loose pants worn with a long shirt.
- 6.
Sandals.
- 7.
5-metre-long cloth draped by Indian women.
- 8.
Long shirt and loose pants.
- 9.
Mark worn between the eyebrows.
- 10.
Also refers to shyness, modesty.
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Ghosh, N. (2019). Fashioning Selves: Femininity, Sexuality and Disabled Women in India. In: Chappell, P., de Beer, M. (eds) Diverse Voices of Disabled Sexualities in the Global South. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78852-4_4
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