Women, Gender and Disability

Historical and Contemporary Intersections of Otherness

Della Perry and Ruth Keszia Whiteside.
The text focuses upon the historical construction of the idea or concept of intellectual
disability. Most versions and varieties of disability are not mutually exclusive and that the
general idea of disability as an homogenizing label.
Likewise, the category of woman as determined by particular essential qualities, regardless of
whether these are understood as biological or cultural in nature.
These determinations and their combinations are not accidental, arbitrary, natural or selfevident, but reflect particular social, and political interests.
It is disconcerting to discover how many ideas about difference and otherness of more than a
century ago, still pervade our contemporary thinking, and in their very intractability have the
appearance of natural truths.
While biological determinisms are common features in notions about what is true or real about
ourselves and others, at the base of all stereotypes about humanity lurks another associated
perception; this is the belief that any person, or any group, can unambiguously and objectively
define truth and reality, and thus determine who or what all others really are or should be.
Sander L. Gilman in Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race and Madness, has
discusses this remarkable ability for humans to creatively produce stereotypes which ensure
some of their centrality and determine others in their difference.
- His work offers valuable insights into the complexities of and interrelationships between what
might at first appear as disconnected versions of otherness. Although we may think that sexism,
racism, and disabilism (as prejudices and phobias), are all isms with separate or distinct
background, even a brief consideration of their recent historical conceptualizations and
applications indicates tat his is simply not so.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 1900) saw woman as a kind of self-evident, essential and
superficially natural category, and certainly without the kind of complexity which he believed
informed his own elevated perceptions. Any depth which women had, was of the deceptive
and mysterious sort, like a riddle or a puzzle to be played with, deciphered, solved and resolved.
Although Friedrich Nietzsche is still revered by some, for his innovative iconoclastic comments
about the moral and intellectual strictures of his day, he was apparently also trapped within a
worldview where hierarchy and category defined and delimited social positions and
possibilities. He envisioned a world which he believed would be different, without repression
and full potentiality; but only for particular individuals, and certainly not for lesser beings like
women, or for other unevolved creatures of a decided intellectual inferiority.
These prejudices with regard to gender and ethnicity just as easily apply to the work of any
major philosopher of the 19th and early 20th century. Probably, the most significant of these
reasons relates to the long history and pervasiveness of dualities in western thinking. The
idea of things as split and oppositional, such as: nature/culture, male/female, mind/body,
reason/unreason, thinking/feeling, is now so intrinsic in out language and though, that one
could not be blamed for considering such distinctions as natural and therefore as quite
unremarkable.
- Perhaps this would be the case if it were not for the fact that generally one pole of
these dualities, (and a proliferation of similar polarized oppositional categories), has been
accorded and socially sanctioned, as having a superior value. In these unequal

valorizations, such dualities become inextricable from the concept of subject and object,
where subjects, and objects are done to.
The history of categorization, and related subject/object distinctions can be traced for centuries
to the writings of Aristotle, but since the 18th Century in particular, the development of scientific
rationalism has continued apace. Reason and objectivity as precepts for western intellectual
and academic discourses in the natural and physical sciences, which supported the so-called
progress of humanity, by sharing the belief that truth, (in the form of scientific objectivity),
was on their side.
- Recently however, it has become clearer that such perspectives reflected only the
perceptions and interests of privileged sections of western society, which took no account of
views of the world which were not like their own.
o Since historically western science has been practices almost exclusively by white,
middle or upper class males, primarily heterosexuals, and until recently, mostly by
individuals with a Christian tradition, the valued characteristics of intellect and
rationality are generalized by the scientists to an extension of the self The
other, by definition, is the opposite of the self, and therefore comes to be
regarded as intrinsically of lesser value.
Implicated in this apparently unambiguous development and self-validation of science,
medicine, and also the areas of psychology and psychiatry in the 19 th and early 20th century,
were the ancient beliefs of an equation of women with nature/matter/emotion/irrationality.
Women like nature and matter were perceived as things to be controlled, and clearly, those
giving directions and setting the parameters for the extension of knowledge and truths, were the
ones with the socially sanctioned professional credentials to do so.
Charles Darwin, and his contemporaries, such as Herbert Spencer (who coined the phrase:
Survival of the fittest). While Darwin had provided a theory emphasizing evolutionary
effects at the level of population of individual variations, (it was) eugenic theory, as a specific
form of social Darwinism, which assumed that the existing social hierarchy resulted from the
differences in the innate qualities and capacities of individuals.
Eugenics was a term originated by Francis Galton, a cousin of Darwins, in the late 1880s. It
encouraged a cultivation of the natural selection principles of evolutionary theory to produce
a more ideal or improved populations, and was premised upon the beliefs about heredity, or
what today we call genetics.
- With regards to women, (who had long been equated with nature and considered of lesser
moral and intellectual capacity), eugenics offered a scientific recognition of and validation for
her natural closeness to the animal kingdom. Any attempt for women to step out of the
traditional gender roles, and to take on what were considered natural masculine tasks and
attributes, were thus perceived as dangerous, and foreboded only a careless reversion or
degeneration of the human species.
Social and scientific evolutionists of the mid to late 19 th Century believed then, that the main
task for women was to assist in the undeniable process of natural selection, by behaving as
good wives and mothers, and by producing and cultivating healthy offspring. Women were
concomitantly perceived as naturally culpable, both for the general lack of intellectual ability,
and for a latent tendency for sexual voraciousness and amorality.
Many of these attributes, as accorded to women by the arbiters of social and scientific truths,
expressed contradictory notions of both aggressive licentiousness, and passive inertness,
expressed by the belief that: To free any women from the passivity was socially
dangerous threatening and a morally damaging unleashing of animal instincts of the most
base sort.

The apparently natural objectivity of biology as evolutionary science was therefore applied
with a vengeance, to female problems of menstruation, pregnancy, and childbirth. This
resulted in the articulation and explication of a spectacular range of mental and physical
illnesses, which were considered to reflect, and to affect the naturally vulnerable and more
nervous constitution of women.
- Women by their very nature were perceived then as defective, their bodies and minds viewed
as perverse constructions which needed scientific and moral intervention.
They were however, not alone in their deficiencies. Those on the margins of good society, the
so-called criminals, prostitutes, inebriates, poor, and many physically and mentally ill people,
were also categorized as deficient and defective. They were objectified as things to be studied
and controlled, as parts of a vast other.
- One of the main example is the extensive category generically referred to as the feebleminded, which included anybody with perceived social, mental, and/or physical
incapabilities.
Measuring up is a key term here. In Victorian sciences, the white, European affluent class
males were at the peak of the evolutionary hierarchy. Women, children, members of the socalled lesser races (any race not considered civilized by the evolved western standard)
and anyone perceived as mentally different, was scientifically shown and measured to be
naturally inferior.
Perceived differences between races were thus paralleled with differences between the sexes,
and between children and adults, and between some adults and the animal world, into a vast and
inclusive hierarchy of being. Taxonomies like these which were considered by their creators as
real and biologically true and natural remained well into the 20 th Century and justified under the
idea of progress many colonial expansions and destruction of other cultures.
- The division and exploitation of labour by gender, age, class and culture, was intrinsic in such
definitions.
- This intersection alone can be seen as exposing the myth of science as neutral or objective.
-----------It is noteworthy that many of these derogatory characteristics expressed wither a too much or a
not enough, tendency, so that a natural and healthy balance was evidently not easily attainable
or even possible, for large sections of the populations.
- It is significant that women, as a gendered category, shared many of the unbalanced features
associated with others considered defective.
The diagnosis of hysteria is a typical womans mental and moral illness.
The attributes usually associated with this illness read like a list of overdetermined traditional
notions about the nature of woman as gendered in western society, so that hysteria appears in
these calculations as both the cause and an effect of being female. For although it was also
believed that males could suffer from hysteria, these were men considered to have somewhat
abnormal and feminine mental organizations.
Common descriptors for the diverse groups called feeble-minded and for women reveal hen a
shared otherness, and included concerns about traits and behaviors like: passivity, weakness,
lack of moral, mental or physical control, incompetence, emotionalism, hyper-sensitivity or
insensitivity, unassertiveness or too much assertiveness, laziness, greediness, craftiness,
trickiness, calculating and deceitful behaviors, impressionability, ineducability,
temperamentalism, immorality, amorality, being difficult, demanding, dependent, unpredictable,
talkative, inconsistent, untrustworthy, indulgent, self-centered, unstable, oversexed, passionate,
undersexed, perverted, irrational, lacking judgment, etc, etc, etc.
- The repetitive intersections of these kinds of characteristics, suggests an association which is
more than coincidental or accidental.

When an idea of past and present as somehow detached, is revised in terms of a perception of all
human experience as interrelated and dynamically interconnected, there is a greater possibility
for some reflection upon the ideas, experiences, and contexts which affect all our lives.
- The way in which contemporary popular ideas about women, gender, and people with an
intellectual disability, still depend in many senses upon eugenic and biological determinations,
suggests that is it important to reflect upon current social and ideological influences.
What is particularly interesting is that the concerns raised about the circumscription of womens
lives through the experience of otherness, have also had important implications for notions
about differences generally.
There only are some ideas about what normal should be. Perhaps there are some things about
normal which may be beneficial when we try to make our way in the world, but differences
need not necessarily be equated with otherness, or with being less than.
Caroline Whitbeck states that the unequal and objectifying forms of otherness may be
overcome. This perspective she suggests:
has as its core a conception of self-other relation that is significantly different than the selfother opposition that underlines much of so-called western thought Since an other is not taken
to be the opposite to the self, the character of the self does not uniquely define the character of
the other by opposition to it: others may be similar or dissimilar in a variety of ways. The
relation then is nor fundamentally dyadic at all, and is better express as self other relations,
because relationships, past and present, realized and sought, are constitutive of the self.