by Kim Q. Hall

About Kim Q. Hall

Kim Q. Hall is Professor of Philosophy and Humanities Council Coordinator at Appalachian State University, where she is also a faculty affiliate of the Women’s Studies and Sustainable Development Programs. She is editor of Feminist Disability Studies (2011) and coeditor, with Chris Cuomo, of Whiteness: Feminist Philosophical Reflections (1999). Currently, she is completing a book manuscript that advances a queer crip feminist perspective on identity and the body’s materiality.

Gender

book Keywords for Disability Studies

Gender and disability, along with race, class, nationality, and sexuality, are constitutive features of the ways in which our fully integrated selves—what Margaret Price (2011) calls “bodyminds”—are lived and known. Gender has emerged as a key site of disability critique in four general areas: (1) sex, impairment, and the “realness” of the body; (2) the medicalization of gender; (3) the mutually reinforcing structures of gender and disability oppression; and (4) the reconfiguration of gender through disability experience. Thus, if disability theorists hope to understand and critique norms of bodily appearance and bodymind functioning, as well as offer meaningful alternative conceptions of the world and being, they must attend to how gender structures and is structured by those norms. Similarly, feminist and queer theorists cannot develop adequate accounts of gender without attending to the entanglement of the meaning and materialization of gender and disability.