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Southern Bodies and Disability: re-thinking

concepts
a
Raewyn Connell
a
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, DOI: 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

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
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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: raewyn.connell@sydney.edu.au.

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 1369
 RAEWYN CONNELL

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 margin-
alised groups. The capacity of social structures and cultural discourses to sort
and define bodies, and to shape bodily experience, was recognised.
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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
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 SOUTHERN BODIES AND DISABILITY

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
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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 embodi-
ment. 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 vulnerabil-
ities 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.
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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, reproduc-
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tionist 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 Oriental-
ism.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
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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 Mediterra-
nean–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
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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 ethno-
religious 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
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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
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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 embodi-
ment 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 knowl-
edges, 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
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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 con-
sumed—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 Potosı́ in the
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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 Juárez.27
Meanwhile neoliberal regimes, whose logic derives from global competi-
tion, have weakened the unions that might give such workers protection.
They have also weakened, under pressure from the IMF or by local ruling-
class 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
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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
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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 gender-
segregated. 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.
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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 sub-
ordinated ethnic groups; it is not alcohol alone that produces the pattern of
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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 . . .
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Notes
Particular thanks to John Fisher, Helen Meekosha and Karen Soldatic.
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3 R Shuttleworth, ‘Disability/difference’, in C Ember & M Ember (eds), Encyclopedia of Medical
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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
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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,
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9 Commission on Social Determinants of Health, Closing the Gap in a Generation: Health Equity through
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10 P Longmore & L Umansky (eds), The New Disability History, New York: New York University Press,
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11 PJ Hountondji, ‘Knowledge appropriation in a post-colonial context’, in CA Odora Hoppers (ed),
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12 D Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton, NJ:
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13 WHO, ‘Access to rehabilitation for the 600 million people living with disabilities’, 2003, at http://
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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),
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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
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28 K Soldatic & H Meekosha, ‘Disability and neoliberal state formations’, in N Watson, C Thomas &
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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
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35 Quoted in C Frohmader & H Meekosha, ‘Recognition, respect and rights: women with disabilities in a
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37 Women with Disabilities Australia (WWDA), Forgotten Sisters: A Global Review of Violence Against
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38 R Connell, Masculinities, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005.
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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:
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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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