Southern Bodies and Disability: re-thinking concepts

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Southern Bodies and Disability: re-thinking concepts Raewyn Connell

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University of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia Published online: 19 Sep 2011.

To cite this article: Raewyn Connell (2011): Southern Bodies and Disability: re-thinking concepts, Third World Quarterly, 32:8, 1369-1381 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2011.614799

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Third World Quarterly, Vol. 32, No. 8, 2011, pp 1369–1381

Southern Bodies and Disability: re-thinking concepts RAEWYN CONNELL Downloaded by [National Cheng Kung University] at 20:14 21 May 2013

ABSTRACT Re-making disability studies from the global South requires a

major reconsideration of concepts. Southern perspectives are emerging across the social sciences and humanities, and are now an important resource for disability studies. Impairment has to be understood in the context of the violence of colonisation and neocolonial power. The global dynamics of capitalist accumulation, and of hierarchical gender relations, change the material character and meaning of disability. Global society has to be understood as embodied, and social embodiment as a reality-forming (ontoformative) process, not a system-maintaining one. The intellectual, cultural and social resources of colonised and postcolonial societies provide vital resources for disability politics. No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main . . . Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

So wrote the great English poet John Donne. As a priest, Donne was mainly concerned with his readers’ souls. But his words also apply to their bodies, and to ours. We are, as embodied beings, ‘part of the main’, profoundly involved in a larger whole. In this paper I explore the global scale of this involvement, starting with fundamental concepts about embodiment, and the location of science in world society. I then reflect on the changing ways disability is involved with key processes that have formed world society: colonisation, global capitalism and patriarchy. Finally, I consider questions about the politics of disability and impairment on a world scale. Social embodiment and ontoformativity In the past, biomedical sciences and social sciences could jog along with a division of labour that simply separated the study of bodies from the study of Raewyn Connell is at the University of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. Email: [email protected]. ISSN 0143-6597 print/ISSN 1360-2241 online/11/081369–13 Ó 2011 Southseries Inc., www.thirdworldquarterly.com http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2011.614799

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social processes. Every so often there was a fight about which was more important—‘nature’ vs ‘nurture’—in studies of intelligence or sex roles. But it was usual for biological determination to be thought more fundamental. A biomedical paradigm reigned in disability policy, and to a large extent still does. The social-constructionist approach to disability that challenged the biomedical model in the 1980s and 1990s was part of a broad rethinking of bodies and society. Similar ideas were at work in feminism, sociology, science and technology studies, cultural studies, public health, sexuality research, and other fields. Challenges arose to biomedical models of causation, to ahistorical classifications of bodies, and to professional power over marginalised groups. The capacity of social structures and cultural discourses to sort and define bodies, and to shape bodily experience, was recognised. In particular, the power of social processes to create hierarchies of bodies, exalting some and abjecting others, has been comprehensively shown.2 Across continents and across centuries disabled people have often been considered unworthy, objects of pity and disgust, tragic, or simply disposable. In some cultures, however, they have been credited with special powers to heal, as shamans or visionaries. Often subjected to violence and abuse, disabled people may also be integrated into communities and given a valued status.3 As a way of resisting biomedical dominance of disability policy, the ‘social model’ of disability was constructed, particularly by scholars in Britain. This model argued that: . . . whatever the individual’s impairment or apparent differences from some socially sanctioned ‘norm’, their capacity to operate in society was primarily determined by the social recognition of their needs, and the provision of ‘enabling’ environments.4

A heavy emphasis on determination by social systems, however, also faces problems—especially when translated to the global South. In the recent emergence of a ‘critical disability studies’ perspective, both disability and impairment are regarded as important dimensions of lived experience.5 In biomedical science, as Krieger makes clear, there is now abundant and varied evidence of the importance of social processes in producing bodily outcomes, from injury to chronic disease.6 Biology and society cannot be held apart; but also cannot simply be added together. A much deeper and more complex interconnection must be acknowledged. Roberts put the issue in a nutshell when she spoke of the ‘co-construction’ of the biological and the social.7 In a very long perspective, some time in the last hundred thousand years, social history replaced biological evolution as the main process of change on the Earth’s surface. Recognising this does not return us to ‘nurture vs nature’, because social history is not independent of human bodies. We need a concept, which I call social embodiment, to refer to the collective, reflexive process that embroils bodies in social dynamics, and social dynamics in 1370


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bodies. When we speak of ‘disability’, we emphasise the first side of social embodiment, the way bodies are participants in social dynamics; when we speak of ‘impairment’, we emphasise the second side, the way social dynamics affect bodies. To understand social embodiment we need to recognise the agency of bodies, not only their materiality as objects, but also their productive power in social relationships. Fertility, labour, growth, ageing, impairment, mobility and vulnerability are important within social processes, they are not external conditions that influence society from another realm of reality. Specific types of impairment may carry very different meanings and call out different social practices. This is well shown in Bergh’s study in Sierra Leone in this issue, where the amputated body is a marker of a national history involving violence, and has access to aid programmes, while intellectual disability remains hidden from the public imaginary. Recognising the historicity of these interactions focuses our attention on social dynamics. There are many theories in social science, some very influential indeed, that are fundamentally static in their view of social process. They include reproductionist sociology, performative gender theory, systems theory and economic equilibrium theory.8 For an understanding of social processes on a world scale we need something different: an approach that centres on the ontoformative character of social process. This means the power to create social realities through historical time. Social structures are always in the process of construction, contradiction and transformation. Their power as determinants of bodily outcomes is recognised, for instance in the recent World Health Organization (WHO) report on ‘social determinants of health’.9 Their determining power derives, not from any systems magic, but precisely from the historical dynamics in which they are involved. The ontoformativity of social process constantly involves social embodiment. Social embodiment is not just a reflection, not just a reproduction, not just a citation. It is a process that generates, at every moment, new historical realities: new embodied possibilities, experiences, limitations and vulnerabilities for the people involved. So we need to understand disability as emerging through time. Disabled people are, indeed, involved in a political process of rediscovering their own histories.10 Southern perspectives in understanding society The biomedical sciences and the social sciences, as we know them today, were constructed in the global metropole, the group of rich capitalist countries of western Europe and north America, formerly the centres of overseas empires and now the ‘core’ of the global economy. Not only was this where the sciences historically took their modern shape; the metropole remains the centre of scientific activity today. This is where the world’s most prestigious universities and research institutes are found, where most of the funding for science comes from, where most of the innovation in method occurs, and where almost all the leading journals are based. 1371


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For scientists working in other parts of the world the centre remains important. Most take their concepts, methods and problems from the metropole, many go to the metropole for training or advanced work, and have careers strongly shaped by their connections with it. This is the situation called ‘extraversion’ by Hountondji and ‘academic dependency’ by Alatas.11 Usually this is not regarded as problematic. Science is thought to be universal, so its concepts and methods are supposed to apply everywhere. If that is the case, where science comes from does not matter. But to an increasing number of scholars it does matter.12 Science is not something that exists outside the culture and society that produce it. Theories that arise in the global metropole are conditioned by the perspectives on the world that are available in the metropole, in the historical circumstances in which metropolitan scientists work at the time. For instance, the static, reproductionist forms of social science mentioned above, arose among intellectuals in the metropole who were looking at problems internal to their society without reference to its global positioning. We must do better than this. One reason is that a universal form of knowledge cannot be based on the experience of a privileged minority alone. On the most generous calculation the metropole accounts for less than one in six of the world’s people. The great majority of disabled people—80 per cent on one estimate13—live in the global South. A second reason is that an intellectual project that cuts itself off from most of the world’s cultures, and many of its most creative intellectuals, radically impoverishes itself. That is not a good base for confronting the daunting problems of world society today. We can move beyond the limits of metropolitan thinking in several ways. One is to name and unpack the metropolitan genres of thought in which the global power of the metropole is embedded. This is the project of ‘postcolonial studies’, the most famous contribution being Said’s Orientalism.14 A second is to value and learn from non-Western forms of knowledge that escaped destruction by the power of the global metropole. This is the project of ‘indigenous knowledge’, involving debates about the articulation of indigenous and metropolitan knowledge systems.15 A third is to examine the forms of knowledge that arose in response to the metropole’s power, among the intellectuals of colonised societies. This is the project I have called ‘southern theory’.16 It taps into a rich literature produced in the global periphery about the experience of the colonised and the dynamics of neocolonialism and contemporary globalisation. These general arguments apply to disability studies, as shown by Meekosha.17 Since the majority of the world’s disabled people live in the global periphery, recognition of their experience must change the shape of disability studies. As a field of knowledge, disability studies currently has the same global North focus as other fields of the human sciences. It too is in need of renovation by moving both empirically and conceptually to a world scale. Such renovation requires a convergence between the argument about social embodiment, and the argument about Southern perspectives. We need to analyse social embodiment on a world scale, and to recognise the 1372


ontoformativity of embodied social practice on a world scale; and we need to do this with the guidance of perspectives from the global South. This issue of Third World Quarterly is dedicated to such a rethinking of disability research.


Conquest and its consequences: the global politics of impairment Over four centuries the militarised kingdoms and republics of western and northern Europe and the north Atlantic, formerly an outpost of Mediterranean–Asian culture, expanded their political and economic reach to the Americas, to south Asia, to the Arab world, to east Asia, to Australia and to Africa, until virtually the whole world had been brought into their orbit. Historians have shown that ‘western’ imperialism was an uneven and turbulent process.18 In some places there was almost complete destruction of indigenous societies (for example, Hispaniola, New England, Tasmania). In others a greater accommodation between cultures was reached (such as Indonesia and India). On every continent, however, there was massive violence. New technologies brought death and maiming to the colonised: the cannon-firing ship of the line, the musket volley, the shell, the machine gun and the bomber aircraft. We remember the horror of the air attack on Guernica, thanks to Picasso. But the bombing of civilians actually began much earlier in the colonies, where Britain, Spain and France used aircraft to bomb rebellious colonial subjects a mere 10 years after the Wright brothers’ famous flight.19 The British called it ‘air control’. Violence in the colonised world came to a crescendo at the end of formal empires, in the wars of independence in the Americas, Vietnam and Algeria, and in the partition of India. But it did not stop with independence. Violent interventions by neocolonial powers have continued: in Vietnam, Palestine, Afghanistan, Chechnya, central America and Iraq. Many postcolonial states became embroiled in coups, civil wars or border wars over the colonial legacy, often with arms and support from metropolitan powers. These include Pakistan, central Africa, and the southern cone dictatorships of South America. I do not want to dwell on violence, but its scale has to be acknowledged. One of the key dynamics in the construction of world society was the social embodiment of power—a deployment of force that, in addition to leaving disabled individuals, collectively disabled whole populations. Meekosha is justified in speaking of the ‘social suffering’ produced by colonisation as a necessary concern of disability studies on a world scale.20 Das’s remarkable study of the partition violence in India, in Critical Events, shows how social suffering was not random but structured by ethnoreligious division and gender relations.21 Women’s bodies became the terrain on which conflicting groups of men struggled for power and revenge. In other settings women’s bodies have been the terrain of blame for social suffering, such as indigenous mothers being held responsible for impairments among children, including foetal alcohol syndrome.22 Although direct violence was the most spectacular, it was not the only process producing impairment. A major part of colonisation was taking 1373


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control of land, shifting indigenous populations off their ancestral territory or making them a dispossessed labour force on it. Plaatje’s Native Life in South Africa is the classic documentation of this process.23 In other cases, such as the westward expansion of the United States, dispossession was more total. Populations still traumatised by these events, and by the subsequent disasters of stolen children, forced resettlement and substandard housing— the experience of many indigenous communities in Australia—are liable to high rates of chronic disease, diabetes, otitis media and liver disease, as well as high levels of violence that produce impairment. Through very complex histories, which will be known to readers of Third World Quarterly, conquest and dispossession have produced landless populations, many of whom have moved into informal settlements around swollen cities. Perhaps a billion people worldwide currently have very precarious access to income, security, education or health services. Many of the disabled people discussed in this special issue are found among the landless poor, and constitute an extremely vulnerable part of the population. Colonial conquest, bringing crisis to the social orders in which embodiment had been organised, and creating new hierarchies of bodies (such as the racial hierarchy of late 19th-century imperialism), changed the ways in which bodily difference, impairment and ability were socially constructed. Religious and cultural meanings of disability, village- and kin-based solidarities, livelihoods, and local customs of support, were all at stake and liable to disruption. The emerging medical model of disability in the north Atlantic world was exported to the colonies. Being bound up with the culture of the colonisers, it was always liable to enter an antagonistic relationship with indigenous knowledge about bodies.24 Contemporary debates about indigenous knowledges, their rationales and their fluctuating relations with ‘western’ science,25 are therefore relevant to any project of empowerment of disabled groups in the global periphery. Global capitalism and its consequences During the 20th century the overseas colonial systems were ended (although the overland settler colonialism of Russia and the US remained). The system of competing empires was replaced by a multi-centred, worldwide corporate economy, with integrated international markets and massive flows of capital. An international state system was constructed, whose main components were the United Nations organisations, such as the World Bank and the WHO, and an international military/police/security apparatus centred on the US. Some of the old imperial states remained influential, in new ways. Several were merged into the European Union, and the US emerged in the 1990s as the sole military superpower. From its early stages in mercantile and agricultural capitalism the new economic order depended on the regulation and destruction of bodies. This became notorious in the ‘industrial revolution’ of the 18th and 19th centuries. Engels’ Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 is the most famous 1374



in a long series of reports that documented exhausting but tightly controlled labour in steam-powered factories, the coal mines that fuelled them, the cramped housing and polluted industrial cities that surrounded them. The process of extracting profit from other people’s labour, institutionalised on a grand scale in capitalism, was also a form of social embodiment. It was significantly gender-structured. Working class men’s bodies were consumed—stressed, injured or worn out—in a process that constructs hegemonic masculinity in the working class community and simultaneously creates profit for the employer.26 Colonialism created labour forces, in mines and plantations, in which such processes were at their most ferocious: Atlantic slavery, indentured migrant labour and forced indigenous labour. The scale of death and impairment in a colonial enterprise like the silver mines of Potosı´ in the Andes, a main source of Spanish royal wealth, was worse than in any of Engels’ factories. Global capitalism has replaced such workforces with free labour, but in circumstances where many are desperate for an income. A ‘race to the bottom’ in industries that are internationally mobile, such as clothing and microprocessor assembly, results in minimum wages, long hours and damaging physical conditions. The maquiladoras of northern Mexico, and their competitors in Thailand, Vietnam and south China, are well known examples. The social suffering produced by this form of industrial development goes beyond problems of industrial health. In northern Mexico, to give just one case, it includes the appalling brutality of the femicides in Ciudad Jua´rez.27 Meanwhile neoliberal regimes, whose logic derives from global competition, have weakened the unions that might give such workers protection. They have also weakened, under pressure from the IMF or by local rulingclass initiative, state-based welfare systems supporting the workers whose bodies show the consequences. The agenda of neoliberalism, which seeks to expand the reach of the market and contract the role of the state, is now felt in all areas of public service. It has affected disability services along with others, pushing for privatisation, encouraging for-profit services, emphasising competition, and imposing indirect controls in the name of accountability. At a deeper cultural level the capitalist order draws a boundary between two categories of bodies: those whose labour generates profit, and those whose labour does not. Of course there have always been differences in the contributions different people make to social production and consumption. But in most cultures some contribution is recognised from almost everyone in the community, old or young, vigorous or not. In capitalism, where value is defined sharply by the dollar, productivity is a concept that applies only to workers in the money economy. This shapes the understanding of disability. Impaired productivity in the labour market, or exclusion from the labour market, becomes a key way of defining the disabled. Under workfare regimes that claim to end paternalistic care and dependence—in fact re-regulating the relation between welfare and 1375


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the labour market—some disabled bodies are defined as work-able, others as deserving of welfare.28 To enable labour market participation becomes a key form of treatment or rehabilitation. To enforce this view of disability, rising levels of surveillance are required. The globalisation of neoliberal capitalism has extended this logic of disability around the world. Capitalism is a dynamic system. It has been through different stages of growth, from mercantile to industrial, and the richest economies now are often called post-industrial. Capitalism takes different shapes: in communist China being symbiotic with a party dictatorship, in the US and India with populist oligarchies, in Saudi Arabia with a puritan patriarchy, in Scandinavia with a struggling social democracy. And it continues to evolve. Among capitalism’s growth points are new ways of making profit from bodies: biotechnology and more. There is the international ‘tissue economy’ that includes the shipment of blood and organs from Third World bodies to First World bodies.29 There is a commodification and redefinition of women’s bodies in global electronic media, via pornography, celebrity and the beauty industry. The beauty industry too is globalising: it now has a presence in some developing countries as a cosmetic-surgery industry.30 Both the tissue economy and the redefinition of bodies have effects on disability: the former by literally manufacturing impaired bodies in the global periphery (the ‘donors’), the latter by circulating fantasies of the perfect body and inciting desire among the global rich to buy perfection. Both produce, as the dark side of the pursuit of health and desirability, a category of rubbish people (to use an Australian indigenous expression) who can be seen as contemptible and expendable. Modern global patriarchy and its consequences One of the major effects of colonialism and globalisation was to transform the gender orders of colonised societies. Colonial workforces were gendersegregated. Missionaries and governments destroyed local customs that offended their own norms. Metropolitan power and wealth created their own normative pressure in the name of modernisation. In an influential study Mies traced the construction of breadwinner/housewife norms around the world as an effect of colonialism.31 In the postcolonial era, global media circulate ‘western’ images of sexual desirability on an enormous scale. Transnational corporations continue to use gender-segregated workforces, often creating new patterns of employment for younger women. Gender is a structure of social relations in which the reproductive capacities of human bodies are brought into history, and in which all bodies, whether fertile or not, are defined by their relationship to the reproductive arena.32 Like all forms of social embodiment, this happens in diverse ways. Most gender orders, nevertheless, are patriarchal; that is, they construct privilege for men and subordination for women as groups. And as local gender orders have been subsumed in a global economy, a modernised patriarchy has become internationally hegemonic. 1376



Patriarchal social orders tend to define women in terms of their breeding capacity, to put it bluntly. They are valued as mothers or potential mothers, especially of sons. This may lead to sharp restrictions on women’s sexuality and mobility. Chakravarti shows how the Indian caste system, as a hierarchy of endogamous groups, makes control of women’s sexuality vital and creates an obsession with purity.33 In Northern mass culture, by contrast, there is an obsessive display of young women’s heterosexual attractiveness at their time of maximum fertility. This is variously displayed in media-driven celebrity culture, pornography and the ‘beauty’ industry. Social embodiment includes the impact of colonialism and neocolonialism on the reproductive process itself. Foetal alcohol syndrome is one site of this, where impairment is produced most often among indigenous and subordinated ethnic groups; it is not alcohol alone that produces the pattern of impairment but alcohol plus social and economic deprivation.34 Neocolonial wars and neocolonial economics leave a legacy of birth impairments: in Vietnam, as a result of defoliant chemicals; in Iraq, with depleted uranium ammunition used by US forces; in maquiladora factories, with pollutants in manufacturing. The patriarchal definition of women in terms of breeding capacity can lead to dire consequences. The United Nations Children’s Fund estimates that in areas of the global South where poverty and local traditions lead to early marriages, at least two million girls have been disabled as a result of obstetric fistula.35 Women who are disabled in other ways may be seen as having dangerous fertility, and some are subjected to forced sterilisation or abortion.36 Where there is food scarcity, women are likely to get less than men. Disabled women are more likely to be in poverty than disabled men, are less likely to receive education and to be in paid employment. Where sons are valued over daughters, female babies may be killed or starved or—now the miracles of modern medicine allow them to be detected—aborted as foetuses. The use of women’s bodies as a terrain for men’s conflicts has been mentioned already. Violence against disabled women has been documented in both the global North and South.37 ‘Gender’ is often read as meaning ‘women’. But men too are involved in gender relations, and patterns of masculinity are constructed by social embodiment.38 The way factory labour is linked with working class masculinity has already been mentioned. Military violence also is gendered,39 involving as it does specific patterns of masculinity and the increasingly mechanised destruction of men’s bodies. War in the metropole has left a long trail not only of physical injury among men but also psychological disability, alcoholism and domestic violence. It is likely that similar consequences have followed wars of conquest, and civil conflicts, in the periphery. Above all, it is the pattern of social relations involving both women and men that is the meaning of gender. Patriarchal gender orders assign most care work to women. In the HIV/AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, most of the care work is done, informally, by women, including women living with HIV (see Evans and Atim in this issue). Women often have 1377

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to become breadwinners as well as carers. There are other gender dynamics in the epidemic, notably in heterosexual relationships where women’s poverty and dependence, or men’s violence and entitlement, create major pathways for transmission of the virus to younger women.40 There is also a gender dynamic in professional care, as nursing, for instance, becomes an increasingly globalised profession.41


Conclusion: embodied encounters on a world scale I have tried to show that familiar social processes and structures must be understood as embodied, and that the fate of bodies has to be understood through social dynamics. This is easier to grasp on a local level, where we have vivid, close-focus studies of embodied gender and class processes, with all their intimate contradictions.42 But it also applies on a world scale, where we have to think about bodies in huge numbers, and about social dynamics of daunting complexity. Social sciences and humanities have become a little too preoccupied with virtual realities, networks and identities. By opening up fresh approaches to dilemmas of embodiment, disability studies can show the way for other fields. Disability studies in the metropole contested the medical model, very powerfully, by prioritising the experience of the disabled. It treated the people themselves as a source of authority. Doing this on a world scale is, by itself, a transformative move. New social actors are brought into view, new questions about the production of disability are raised. Questions of strategy are thrown into the melting pot. For instance, an important theme of social scientific work on disability in the metropole has been the role of the state. The state is a key to the power of medical models: it has been the provider of services, and has defined or denied rights. In post-structuralist approaches, perceptions of disability have been read through the lens of governmentality and normativity.43 In studies of neoliberalism the use of state power has always been in question. Issues about disability and the state take a different shape in relation to the international and the postcolonial state. The UN has been the venue for the world’s key statements on rights, including rights of the disabled. But UN action involves unstable coalitions of governments, bureaucracies and NGOs. In the developing world—given the willingness of local elites to reject human rights regimes as neocolonial impositions, and of metropolitan powers to ride over human rights in pursuit of profit and security—it is often NGOs rather than states that pursue rights agendas. But NGOs, even the most influential (Oxfam for instance), are constrained by the neoliberal environment from which they are funded, and are influenced by the professional cultures of the global North. Politics among disabled groups is also likely to take different forms in the global South from those familiar in the global North. This is not only a matter of different cultures. As I have emphasised above, the history of social embodiment in the colonised world is different. Contemporary economic 1378



structures and resource levels are different, and political opportunities and needs are different. Consider the dim prospects of identity politics in contemporary China, to take only one example. The young Aboriginal mothers whose experience with foetal alcohol syndrome in Australia is documented by Salmon were able to make use of the medical model;44 and the same is said of disabled people’s mobilisation in China. In some contexts the priority action to benefit disabled groups is simply to stop the violence; that would be true in the Congo at present. In other contexts housing reform might be the most urgent task. The resources available to disabled groups are also likely to differ from those in the metropole. Countries of the periphery may hold important resources. Some, such as rubber and oil, make them vulnerable to destructive intervention: Congo is the classic example, Nigeria is the contemporary. But there are also social resources, local care mechanisms, which may have survived the disruptions of recent history. Village society had its own brutality, and its own triage, that could result in neglect or infanticide of disabled children. But it also protected some, and has had a certain resilience. So have the informal settlements of the new mega-cities. Social resources may remain—skills, customs, kinship, networks, cultural understandings—on which disabled people might draw. Local communities are capable of changing culture and inventing new strategies. An example is the growing number of working class families in India who have changed gender divisions of labour as workforce opportunities for women have emerged. Indigenous social knowledge is capable of development, and disability politics may find resources here that are not available from the metropole or from international agencies. In moving beyond metropole-defined understandings of disability, and metropolitan models of disability politics, this is one of the most important points. The colonised and postcolonial world has intellectual resources. It has ideas, principles, research agendas, art forms and religions that can inform struggles to overcome marginality, prevent damage, and make the voices of disabled groups heard (see De Clerck in this issue). I started with a quotation from a Christian author. I would like to finish with a Muslim author and an Islamic principle. The author is Ali Shariati, sociologist and theologian, talking about Islam as a socially engaged religion: Islam is a realistic religion and loves nature, power, beauty, wealth, affluence, progress, and the fulfilment of all human lives. Its Prophet is a man of life, politics, power, and even beauty. Its book, more than being concerned with metaphysics and death, speaks about nature, life, world, society and history . . . It invites people to submit themselves to God, and urges revolt against oppression, injustice, ignorance and inequality.45

To Shariati, the fundamental theological principle of the unity and indivisibility of God (tawhid) has as a corollary the unity of humankind, and a powerful principle of equality. No human has a right to set themselves up as a god over other humans. And no man, or woman, is an island . . . 1379

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Notes Particular thanks to John Fisher, Helen Meekosha and Karen Soldatic. 1 World Health Organization, World Report on Disability, Geneva: WHO, 2011. 2 F Haug and others, Female Sexualization: A Collective Work of Memory, London: Verso, 1987; D Kirk, The Body, Schooling and Culture. Geelong: Deakin University Press, 1993; and K Soldatic & J Biyanwila, ‘Tsunami and the construction of disabled third world body’, Global South: SEPHIS e-magazine, 6(3), 2010, pp 75–84. 3 R Shuttleworth, ‘Disability/difference’, in C Ember & M Ember (eds), Encyclopedia of Medical Anthropology: Health and Illness in the World’s Cultures, New York: Kluwer/Plenum, 2004, pp 360– 373. 4 H Meekosha, ‘Drifting down the Gulf Stream: navigating the cultures of disability studies’, Disability and Society, 19(7), 2004, p 723. 5 H Meekosha & R Shuttleworth, ‘What’s so ‘‘critical’’ about critical disability studies?’, Australian Journal of Human Rights, 15(1), 2009, pp 47–75; and K Paterson & B Hughes, ‘Disability studies and phenomenology: the carnal politics of everyday life’, Disability & Society, 14(5), 1999, pp 597–610. 6 N Krieger, ‘Embodiment: a conceptual glossary for epidemiology’, Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, 59(5) 2005, pp 350–355. 7 C Roberts, ‘Biological behaviour? Hormones, psychology and sex’, NWSA Journal, 12(3) 2000, pp 1–20. 8 R Connell, ‘Northern theory: the political geography of general social theory’, Theory and Society, 35(2), 2006, pp 237–264. 9 Commission on Social Determinants of Health, Closing the Gap in a Generation: Health Equity through Action on the Social Determinants of Health. Final Report of the Commission on Social Determinants of Health, Geneva: WHO, 2008. 10 P Longmore & L Umansky (eds), The New Disability History, New York: New York University Press, 2001. 11 PJ Hountondji, ‘Knowledge appropriation in a post-colonial context’, in CA Odora Hoppers (ed), Indigenous Knowledge and the Integration of Knowledge Systems, Claremont: New Africa Books, 2002, pp 23–38; and SF Alatas, Alternative Discourses in Asian Social Science: Responses to Eurocentrism, New Delhi: Sage, 2006. 12 D Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000; CT Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003; R Connell, Southern Theory: The Global Dynamics of Knowledge in Social Science, Sydney: Allen & Unwin Australia, 2007; and S Harding, Sciences from Below: Feminisms, Postcolonialities, and Modernities, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. 13 WHO, ‘Access to rehabilitation for the 600 million people living with disabilities’, 2003, at http:// www.who.int/mediacentre/news/notes/2003/np24/en/, accessed 5 June 2011. 14 EW Said, Orientalism, New York: Pantheon, 1978. 15 Odora Hoppers, Indigenous Knowledge and the Integration of Knowledge Systems. 16 Connell, Southern Theory. 17 H Meekosha, ‘Decolonizing disability: thinking and acting globally’, Disability and Society, 26(6), 2011, in press 18 U Bitterli, Cultures in Conflict: Encounters between European and Non-European Cultures, 1492–1800, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989. 19 S Lindqvist, A History of Bombing, New York: New Press, 2001. 20 Meekosha, ‘Decolonizing disability’. 21 V Das, Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995. 22 A Salmon, ‘Dis/abling states, dis/abling citizenship: young Aboriginal mothers and the medicalisation of fetal alcohol syndrome’, Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, 5(2), 2007, available at http:// www.jceps.com/?pageID¼article&articleID¼103. 23 ST Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa: Before and Since the European War and the Boer Rebellion, Braamfontein: Ravan Press, 1982. 24 J Gilroy, ‘The theory of the cultural interface and indigenous people with disabilities in New South Wales’, Balayi, 10, 2009, pp 44–58. 25 PJ Hountondji (ed), Endogenous Knowledge: Research Trails, Dakar: CODESRIA, 1997. 26 M Donaldson, Time of our Lives: Labour and Love in the Working Class, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1991. 27 P Ravelo Blancas, ‘We never thought it would happen to us: approaches to the study of the subjectivities of the mothers of the murdered women of Ciudad Jua´rez’, in H Dominguez-Ruvalcaba & I Corona (eds), Gender Violence at the US–Mexico Border, Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2010, pp 35–57.

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SOUTHERN BODIES AND DISABILITY 28 K Soldatic & H Meekosha, ‘Disability and neoliberal state formations’, in N Watson, C Thomas & A Roulstone (eds), Routledge Handbook of Disability Studies, London: Routledge, in press. 29 C Waldby & R Mitchell, Tissue Economies: Blood, Organs and Cell Lines in Late Capitalism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. 30 AZ Aizura, ‘Where health and beauty meet: femininity and racialization in Thai cosmetic surgery clinics’, Asian Studies Review, 33(3), 2009, pp 303–317. 31 M Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour, London: Zed Books, 1986. 32 R Connell, Gender: In World Perspective, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009. 33 U Chakravarti, Gendering Caste: Through a Feminist Lens, Calcutta: Stree, 2003. 34 C O’Leary, ‘Fetal alcohol syndrome: diagnosis, epidemiology and developmental outcomes’, Journal of Pediatrics & Child Health, 40(1–2), 2004, pp 2–7. 35 Quoted in C Frohmader & H Meekosha, ‘Recognition, respect and rights: women with disabilities in a globalized world’, in D Goodley, B Hughes & L Davis (eds), Disability and Social Theory, London: Palgrave Macmillan, in press. 36 Center for Reproductive Rights, Reproductive Rights Violations as Torture and Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment: A Critical Human Rights Analysis, New York: Center for Reproductive Rights, 2010. 37 Women with Disabilities Australia (WWDA), Forgotten Sisters: A Global Review of Violence Against Women with Disabilities, WWDA Resource Manual on Violence Against Women with Disabilities, Hobart: WWDA, 2007. 38 R Connell, Masculinities, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005. 39 C Cockburn, ‘Gender relations as causal in militarization and war: a feminist standpoint’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 12(2), 2010, pp 139–157. 40 D Epstein, R Morrell, R Moletsane & E Unterhalter, ‘Gender and HIV/AIDS in Africa south of the Sahara: interventions, activism, identities’, Transformation, 54, 2004, pp 1–16. 41 S Wrede, ‘Nursing: globalization of a female-gendered profession’, in E Kuhlmann & E Annandale (eds), The Palgrave Handbook of Gender and Healthcare, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, pp 437–453. 42 JW Messerschmidt, Flesh and Blood: Adolescent Gender Diversity and Violence, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004. 43 S Tremain (ed), Foucault and the Government of Disability, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2005. 44 A Salmon, ‘Dis/abling states, dis/abling citizenship’. 45 A Shariati, What is to be Done? The Enlightened Thinkers and an Islamic Renaissance, Houston, TX: Institute for Research and Islamic Studies, 1986, pp 43–44.

Notes on contributor Raewyn Connell is University Professor at the University of Sydney. A leading Australian social scientist, she is author of 21 books, including Southern Theory; Masculinities, Gender & Power; and Confronting Equality.

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