A Balancing Act: How Women with a Hidden Disability Perform Femininity — Page 8:
36 Women with disabilities are counseled away from motherhood, routinely persuaded that their own health will be jeopardized, or that the baby might inherit the ‘problem,’ or that their own impairments will keep them from being a good mother (Edwards and Imrie; Sheldon). I can relate to many females with disabilities who are confronted at a very young age about how to prevent the birth of a child like ourselves. I was still a child, only twelve years old, when I heard the first of many warnings, “When it is time to think about starting a family, I strongly suggest….” Procreation was the furthest thing from my mind, but the medical model was becoming etched in my psyche: prevention of more disability at all costs.
Conclusion
37 Ultimately, women with unapparent disabilities are juxtaposed between influential societal ideals of what it means to be a woman and the feminist call to resent and resist such oppressive standards. Some standards are entirely out of reach, while others assist and abate their daily struggle, presenting these women with a complex paradox.
38 When I ‘discovered’ feminism, I remember feeling enlightened, empowered, liberated. The more feminist literature I became immersed in, the more it became engrained in me that anything but complete independence and autonomy goes against the tenets of feminism: “I can do it myself. I am a woman, hear me roar!” This idea made me hate the ways that I am not independent; it made me feel guilty for the ways I have used my femininity to my advantage in soliciting help. When I became involved in disability studies, I learned that I am not alone in the observation that feminism neglects women with disabilities, as we are perceived to embody stereotypically feminine qualities (Sherr Klein; Sheldon; Fine and Asch). Prolific in the literature are accusations against the feminist movement for undermining the struggle of women with disabilities in pursuit of advancing power and potency (Fine and Asch; Morris; Garland-Thomson). My definition of independence changed when I read George Bernard Shaw’s quote (1916) posted on a Society for Disability Studies listserv email: “Independence? That’s middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on Earth.” It was an epiphany for me. I can ask someone to lift my carry-on into the storage compartment in an airplane, or to unscrew the cap off my water bottle, or to open a heavy door, without batting my eyes and raising the pitch of my voice. I can be an interdependent woman, a feminist, and I have physical limitations. I can be weak in body without being weak in spirit. I, like many women with a hidden disability, am learning how to live in paradox.
39 Women with hidden disabilities learn to transform their identity and needs depending on the situational context. With a foot in both the nondisabled and the disability worlds, they both belong to both and fit completely into neither. The hidden disability is framed differently minute to minute as it is integrated into the individual identity as a “flexible continuum of responses that folds back on itself in various directions in response to myriad of internal and external factors” (Olney and Kim 4). By better understanding the commonalities and differences present in the individual experience of hidden disability, women with hidden disabilities and their support system may benefit from hearing a story they can relate to, become empowered for healthy preservation of self, and they might receive the message that, although it may feel like it, they are not alone in this limbo between the nondisabled and disabled worlds.