Tulasi Acharya
Disability is built on the social and cultural environments. They shape our understanding and perception of what it means to be disabled and how it is different from the concept of able body. The idea of disability is gendered, and it clashes with cultural ideas about gender in specific ways. Particularly, in the case of women, as they are already considered “the second sex” or “the other, female disability is even more prevalent and transparent. This ideology of disability regarding ability preserves and authenticates what it means to be normal and this definition limits women to certain “normal” standards. Regarding this socially and culturally-based concept of disability, Garland-Thomson writes, disability provides for the able-bodied “cultural capital to those who can claim such status, [and] who can reside within these subject positions” (1997, p. 25). It is clear from these words that, the ideology about disability will rather produce more disabilities and create the binary normative standard of ability vs. disability, able vs. disable.
The “ideology of ability” is a concept Tobin Siebers discusses in his book, Disability Theory (2010). This ideology of disability is a concept which is created in specific cultural and social contexts. One is able if one fit in the categorization of what it means to be able and the other who does not fit in the category will be discarded. To reiterate, a human being is abled only when s/he fits into the category of what it means to be an able human being, and if s/he does not fit in that category, s/he deemed abnormal, not fully human, different, deviant, other, and therefore disabled, beings fallen from the “baseline of humanness” (Siebers, 2010, p. 10). In the Context of Nepal, religious and cultural values disable women’s autonomy in general, and create even greater disadvantages for women who are physically disabled.
This paper discusses gender, disability, and literature in the Global South by examining of the writings of two physically disabled women writers from Nepal, Bishnu Kumari Waiwa and Jhamak Ghimire. The paper analyzes their writings and shows how they challenge stigmas of the disabled body by deconstructing the “ideology of ability” through their poetry, fiction, and autobiographical narratives. In this paper, Waiwa and Ghimire celebrate sexuality and disability as sources of creativity, agency, and identity in narratives that deconstruct cultural or social models of sexuality, motherhood, and beauty. In this paper, feminist disability and feminist theory guide an analysis of Waiwa and Ghimire’s writing to advance the understanding of gender, culture, disability and literature in the Global South.
Keywords: Ideology of ability, disability, Nepal, women, Parijat, Jhamak Ghimire, governance, women, Nepal, democracy, Global south, religious and cultural values