Pulling our focus towards ableism: Reflections on the conceptual possibilities of mobilizing feminist disability studies to study Canadian income support programs


Kendal David, Carleton University

In this paper presentation, I consider the theoretical possibilities of using feminist disability studies (FDS) to research social assistance and other income supports in Canada. Informed by my experience designing an FDS-informed doctoral dissertation project, I consider how taking up this theoretical frame offers new conceptual possibilities and new questions to inform poverty research in Canada. The relationship between disability, gender, and poverty is significant; however, research on Canadian income supports has yet to mobilize FDS to consider how ideological issues like productivity and reproductivity shape these programs. In this presentation, I consider how theoretical contributions from feminist disability studies–including robust conceptualizations of productivity, the marketization of care, and the significance of interdependence–could be effectively mobilized for more robust analyses of income support programs. Drawing on the work of core feminist disability scholars, I identify key concepts and insights from this body of knowledge that can meaningfully inform research on income insecurity. To make the case for feminist disability studies’ usefulness for examining income supports, I contend that: Feminist disability studies offers a robust conceptualization of labour and work, which attends to how productivity is conceptualized, measured, and revered, and how cisheterosexism, ableism, and racism shape these normative frameworks. While visioning anti-capitalist futures where labor is reimagined, it demands acknowledgement and acceptance that people may never be employed at all (for so many reasons) and attends to those in the “cliffhangers” (Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018, p. 40) of disability identity status, who are denied access to resources by neoliberal employment and social support policy. Feminist disability studies foregrounds the consequences of marking people as unproductive (i.e., unable to meet capitalist expectations of labor and productivity) and, in particular, highlights the relevance of ongoing institutionalization and the marketization of care to social policy and analyses of poverty and income supports. Feminist disability studies acknowledges the eugenic tendencies of capitalism and confronts its manifestations in for-profit care provision which mark so-called ‘unproductive’ people as objects for extraction. Feminist disability studies rejects independence as an ideal (in the ways it is conceptualized in the context of ableist capitalism) as well as the framing of dependence (on the state, on caregivers, on other people) as a problem to be solved. Recognizing that connection and community are essential for survival, feminist disability studies research that examines poverty should consider how, for example, income support programs, either facilitate or obstruct the existence and flourishing of ecologies of interdependence. I conclude the presentation by reflecting on the possibilities of pulling analytic focus towards ableism and sexism, and how FDS offers researchers a unique and nuanced way to think about the importance of robust social welfare systems which afford people dignified access to material well-being regardless of their “productive” capacity in a capitalist labour market. 

This paper will be presented at the following session: