Toward a Feminist Theory of Disability

Susan Wendell’s article is an early classic of feminist disability theory. It argues that feminism cannot seriously address embodiment, medicine, care, and autonomy while treating disability as a marginal case or a purely medical problem. Disabled experience reveals how society sets some bodies as standard and marks others as failed, dependent, or unreliable.

The article is powerful because it connects bodily experience with epistemic authority. Wendell examines how pain, fatigue, limited mobility, and medical systems shape a person’s understanding of their own body, and how deep epistemic harm occurs when doctors, institutions, or relatives are granted more authority to describe that body than the person living in it.

For FemRes, this text belongs with feminist philosophy, body politics, and disability justice. It gives later feminist disability studies a core question: how can feminism acknowledge bodily vulnerability and material limitation while refusing to reduce disabled life to tragedy or defect?