Feminist Disability Studies · Research
Toward a Feminist Theory of Disability
Wendell's classic article places disability inside feminist philosophy and medical ethics, critiquing how medical authority, bodily norms, and social environments produce disabled experience.
Abstract
Wendell argues that feminist theory must account for disability, illness, medical authority, bodily knowledge, and the social organization of environments.
Research notes
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?
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