Body PoliticsPapers

Garland-Thomson maps feminist disability studies as a field, showing how disability reshapes feminist questions about bodies, staring, normalcy, dependency, and public life.

McRuer connects queer theory and critical disability studies, arguing that compulsory able-bodiedness and heteronormativity jointly produce normal bodies, normal desires, and acceptable life.

This groundbreaking article challenges the fundamental distinction between 'sex' and 'gender' by demonstrating that 'sex' itself is a social construction. Through examining intersexuality and transsexualism as embodied experiences that disrupt binary categories, Hird reveals how medical and social institutions work to maintain artificial divisions. The paper questions whether emphasizing sexual difference or exposing sex as construction better serves feminist goals for social transformation.

An exploration of how mothers as political activists challenge traditional conceptions of citizenship. Reiger examines maternal activism in Australian childbirth reform movements, arguing that mothers' claims for participation in health policy reconceive citizenship to include care, embodiment, and community advocacy.

A groundbreaking exploration of how maternal embodiment, particularly breastfeeding, transforms academic writing and knowledge production. Bartlett develops an 'epistemology of breasts' that challenges traditional boundaries between personal experience and scholarly practice.

This 2000 article examines feminist agency through the lens of embodiment, drawing on Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology to analyze the British suffragette movement. Parkins focuses on Mary Leigh's suffragette career to argue that corporeal performance - the strategic use of women's bodies in daring protests - constituted a powerful form of feminist political agency that contested the boundaries of citizenship and the political domain.

Wendell's classic article places disability inside feminist philosophy and medical ethics, critiquing how medical authority, bodily norms, and social environments produce disabled experience.

This groundbreaking 1980 essay analyzes the particularity of feminine bodily experience through a phenomenological lens. Young combines Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the body with de Beauvoir's existentialist feminism to explore how patriarchal society shapes women's bodily comportment, movement patterns, and spatial perception, revealing how gendered bodily experience limits women's agency and self-realization.

Hélène Cixous's 1975 classic feminist essay introduces the important concept of 'écriture féminine' (feminine writing), calling on women to reclaim their bodies and voices through writing, and remains one of the most influential texts of French feminist theory.

This groundbreaking 1975 essay introduces the concept of 'écriture féminine' (feminine writing), calling for women to reclaim their bodies and desires through writing. Cixous reinterprets the myth of Medusa, transforming her from a monstrous figure into a symbol of feminine power and creativity, challenging patriarchal language systems and advocating for the revolutionary potential of women's writing.