Feminist Disability Advocacy in Canada: Participatory Democracy and the Politics of Invisibility


Valérie Grand'Maison, University of Guelph

Born out of the exclusions feminist disability activists experienced from both the Canadian feminist and disability movements, the feminist disability movement has adopted a more or less explicit intersectional approach throughout its 40 year history to address issues faced by women and girls with disabilities. Yet little recent scholarship exists on their strategies, decision-making processes, and challenges. This paper examines how a Canadian feminist disability organization has engaged with interlocking structures of oppression and privilege in its advocacy against gendered violence. Drawing on the elements of the active solidarity framework elaborated by Einwohner et al. (2019), I trace dynamics of representation, recognition, and participation of diverse women with disabilities in the organization’s antiviolence efforts. I conducted a document review and semi-structured interviews with key informants to identify how differences among women and women with disabilities are made to matter in the organization’s decision-making, organizational structure, materials, leadership, opportunities for dissent, strategies, relationships. Findings indicate that, from its beginning, the feminist disability movement in Canada is deeply committed to processes of participatory democracy, where women with disabilities across the country are meaningfully involved in every step of the advocacy. However, resisting the invisibility of women with disabilities in antiviolence activism and policy-making in the context of limited government funding, feminist disability advocacy reproduces dynamics of erasure and exclusion that sustain violence against specific group of women. This paper contributes to articulating how intersectionality is practiced in Canadian civil society and theoretically expands on framework that seek to analyze its application.

This paper will be presented at the following session: