With 1.3 billion people (and counting) living with disabilities around the world, and in the context of a neoliberal order that prioritizes ‘competition and body optimization’, it has never been more crucial to explore the ‘relationship between health and disability’, writes the Austrian journal L’Homme: European Review of Feminist History. But what is ‘disability’?
In recent decades the focus has shifted from understanding disability as something inherent in the individual to seeing it as ‘the result of interactions between body, person and environment’. A distinction is now made between impairment, a person’s physical or biological condition, and disability, caused by societal barriers that prevent people with impairments living an independent life.
These barriers can take various forms: ‘government intervention, social norms, institutional regulations or practical obstacles, such as a lack of (financial, medical or emotional) support, a lack of integration and even demonization or criminalization’.
Disability history explores how these barriers have changed over time, and especially ‘how disabilities have historically been constructed as deviance’. Feminist disability studies take an intersectional approach based on the observation that disability and gender studies both deal centrally with power relations and inequalities.
The articles in this issue of L’Homme examine disability from the perspective of women’s and gender history, using varied examples to reveal how ‘the boundaries between the body, society and discourse shift and how disability can take on very different “faces’”.
Early modern misogyny
Early modern witch persecutions were shaped by ‘the relationship between delusion, mania or melancholy, witchcraft and gender’, writes Claudia Opitz-Belakhal. The sixteenth-century physician Johann Weyer was among the first to propose a link between witchcraft and madness, arguing that accused witches were not criminals but ‘old women, melancholic, unable to control their senses’. Drawing on humoral medicine, he claimed that post-menopausal women were especially susceptible to melancholy and demonic illusions because of a dominance of ‘black bile’. Rather than execution, he insisted, they simply needed proper religious instruction.
Weyer’s contemporary, the jurist Jean Bodin, rejected this defence, portraying witches as wilfully corrupt and arguing that women surrendered themselves to the Devil out of weakness and greed. These opposing interpretations intersected with wider misogynistic stereotypes, with women seen as ‘more gullible, superstitious and easily led’ than men.
Although Weyer intended to mitigate persecution by portraying elderly women as ‘pitiable’, his medicalised image of the melancholic old woman reinforced connections between femininity, irrationality and evil, creating an understanding of melancholy as a precursor to devil worship that ultimately contributed to the persecution and execution of thousands of women. ‘(Supposed) mental distress and illness thus became a deadly threat to those affected, a dis/ability in its most extreme form’.
Fascism and disability
Dagmar Herzog situates disability history within histories of sexuality, gender and eugenics, arguing that debates over disability are also about social value and national identity: ‘bullying the weak has always been a hallmark of fascism’. The history of contraception and abortion ‘cannot be told without reference to the rise of eugenics’, while the Holocaust itself was deeply connected to the persecution of disabled people.
Herzog is particularly interested in ‘the evidently powerful allure of eugenics, despite the inadequacy of its scientific premises’, and in how discriminatory attitudes towards disabled people persisted long after 1945. Raymond Williams’s concept of ‘structures of feeling’ can help explore ‘the emotional complexities’ of disability, ‘without which we really understand nothing’.
The relationship between gender and disability is central. Although the Nazis sterilized similar numbers of men and women, the consequences for women were often worse because motherhood was considered ‘an essential aspect of womanhood’. More fundamentally, gendered ideas about ‘fitness for work’ and sexuality shaped who was considered valuable or expendable. Ultimately, ‘societies in which people with disabilities are treated with care and respect are also societies in which reproductive rights and sexual self-determination are the norm’.
Age and (in)ability
Although not a disability, aging can also be usefully explored through the lens of (in)ability. Denitsa Nencheva shows how ‘the ageing process presented a challenge to the state’ in socialist Bulgaria. ‘It required … the effective, normative and ideological construction of social spaces for ageing individuals’. The official discourse of government-issued medical journals reinforced ‘the narrative of the abundant social policies and goods provided by the state to its people’ while also ‘responsibilizing’ individuals to remain productive members of society into old age.
Although socialist ideology promoted gender equality, elderly men and women continued to be shaped by deeply gendered expectations concerning work, emotional behaviour and family responsibilities. Even discussions of marriage and emotional life in old age were framed by state-centred ideas of collective welfare. Late-life marriage was positioned as socially beneficial and emotionally hygienic, rooted more in companionship than sexuality. Discourses around ageing and late marriage functioned as ‘regulatory tools, negotiating the boundaries of desire, care and autonomy in old age while reaffirming the gendered moral order that underpinned socialist visions of a healthy, productive and governable population’.
Families and the far right
Outside the focus: analysing the role of the family role in Austria’s Identitarian movement, Judith Goetz writes that the ‘heteronormative, autochthonous’ family is seen on the far-right as a ‘haven where traditional values can be protected against social change’.
While groups such as the Identitarians have modernised their ideology and language through social media strategies and concepts such as ‘ethnopluralism’, their understanding of the family remains deeply traditional and patriarchal. The white nuclear family is presented as the ‘central pillar of society’ and as the key mechanism for preserving ethnic and cultural continuity against perceived threats such as migration, queer identities and liberal modernity.
The family, portrayed as ‘simultaneously threatened and as a source of salvation’, is exploited in a ‘rhetoric of scandalization and crisis’. On one hand, white families are victims of multiculturalism and gender delusion, with inclusive education and LGBTQ+ visibility framed as forms of ‘indoctrination’ that threaten the ‘natural’ order. On the other, the family is imagined as a solution to demographic decline, with women encouraged to have more children to resist the so-called ‘Great Replacement’.
Review by Cadenza Academic Translations