Abstract
This chapter examines the complex relationship between psychology and disability through the lenses of power and gender. The first part of the chapter takes up the issue of power as control, examining how power is exercised over disability communities through the forces of ableism, sexism, and other intersecting oppressions. We also take up ways in which the discipline of psychology is part of a powerful system that constructs, enforces, and maintains ableism. The second part of the chapter is focused on power as resistance and vision and explores how power is exercised by disability communities for social transformation to end ableism, sexism, and other intersecting forms of oppression as well as some ways that psychological research has advanced disability rights activist principles and helped us understand disability identity and activism. We conclude with a call to more meaningfully learn about and reflect principles of disability activisms and politics (from rights to justice) in the discipline and practice of psychology in order to transform it. Content warnings for this chapter: mentions of psychological and psychiatric ableism; eugenics; intersecting social oppressions including ableism, sexism, racism, and settler colonialism; and intimate partner violence.
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Notes
- 1.
The term “bodyminds,” introduced in a disability studies context by Margaret Price (2015; see also Sami Schalk’s [2018] Bodyminds reimagined: (Dis)ability, race, and gender in Black women’s speculative fiction), refers to the inextricable and mutually-influential relationship between the physical and the mental, including as sites of [so-called] impairment.
- 2.
Although we do not directly engage feminist standpoint theory (e.g., Harding [1991]) in this chapter, we want to acknowledge the influence of that critical work to our own thinking about feminist disability studies perspectives in psychology (see, e.g., Coffman-Rosen & Ostrove, 2020) but also the ways in which Linton’s articulation of the “vantage point of the atypical” in the area of disability in particular resonates with Garland-Thomson’s (2002) use of Nancy Mairs’ (1996) concept of “sitpoint.”
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Nishida, A., Ostrove, J.M. (2023). Power as Control/Power as Resistance and Vision: Disability and Gender in Psychology (and Beyond). In: Zurbriggen, E.L., Capdevila, R. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Power, Gender, and Psychology . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41531-9_16
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