New Book on/by ‘Disabled Women’ Published

A new book – Living the Edges: A Disabled Women’s Reader edited by Diane Driedger – has just been published. 

This collection brings together the diverse voices of women with various impairments, both physical and mental. The women speak frankly about the societal barriers they encounter in their everyday lives due to social attitudes and physical and systemic inaccessibility. They bring to light the discrimination they experience through sexism, because they are women, and through ableism, because they have impairments. For them, the personal is definitely political.

Here, Canadian women discuss their lives in the areas of employment, body image, sexuality and family life, society’s attitudes, and physical, sexual and emotional abuse. While society traditionally views having a disability as “weakness” and that women are the “weaker” sex, this collection points to the strength, persistence, and resilience of disabled women living the edges.

Articles include, among others:

• “Feminism, Disability and Transcendence of the Body” by Susan Wendell
• “Living on the Edges” by Charlotte Caron and Gail Christy
• “Mirror Woman: Cracked Up Crazy Bitch Conja Identity” by Marie Annharte Baker;
• “Margins Are Not For Cowards” by Cheryl Gibson; “Triple Jeopardy: Native Women with Disabilities” by Doreen Demas
• “Coming Out of Two Closets” by Jane Field; “Performing My Leaky Body” by Julie Devaney
• “To Be Or Not to Be? Whose  Question Is It, Anyway? Two Women With Disabilities Discuss the Right To Assisted Suicide” by Tanis Doe and Barbara Ladouceu
• “Living Poorly: Disabled Women on Income Support” by Sally Kimpson
• “‘Have You Experienced Violence or Abuse?’: Talking With Girls and Young Women with Disabilities” by Michelle Owen
• “The Geography of Oppression” by Joy Asham

We like to draw your attention, particularly, to the chapter ‘Art, Sticks and Politics’ by the marvellous Nancy Hansen.