Southern gendered disability reflections: The everyday experiences of rural women with disabilities after the armed conflict in Sri Lanka

Abstract

The Global South contains 80 per cent of the world’s disabled people, who are located mainly in rural and poverty-stricken areas (Grech 2012). There is an emerging and insightful body of work that engages with the everyday experiences of people with a disability living in the Global South (see Soldatic and Grech 2014; Ghai 2015; Samararatne and Soldatic 2015). As Meekosha and Soldatic (2011) suggest, a politics of disability that considers the struggles in the Global South to help understand the social dynamics in bodies does much to recognize the multiplicity of disabled identities as well as the identities of impairment that can further mobilize the global disability movement. This is an important advancement for critical disability scholarship. Until recently the epistemological and methodological focus of the experience, meaning and interpretation of disability has been grounded in Northern (European and North American) urban, post-industrialist settings (Grech 2012). While this setting is relevant to the experiential logic of disability in the Global North, when applied outside this context, such logics too often hide the nuanced and negotiated lives of people with disabilities living in the Global South (Soldatic 2013). Writers of the South, such as Ghai (2015), explicitly argue that disability epistemologies of the North fail to comprehend the complex layering of class, gender and caste embedded in a political situational logic that shapes the reality of disability in the Global South