Making Sense of the Occurrence of Impairments among Women with Locomotor Disabilities in Assam
Keywords:
Intersectionality, Disability, Impairment, Majority World, AssamAbstract
This paper elaborates on how women with locomotor disabilities and their family members make sense of the occurrence of their impairments in the specific contexts of their lives. The paper argues that the binary distinction between impairment and disability as espoused by the social model is irrelevant in the context of persons with disabilities in the majority world. The study was conducted among 18 women with different locomotor disabilities who had acquired their impairments early in life in the district of Kamrup Metropolitan in Assam. Using intersectionality as an analytical framework, this paper helps in understanding how the interplay of a multitude of factors such as nature of impairment, social class, social capital, access to healthcare, parents’ knowledge about child health and, place of residence work simultaneously to co-construct the experience of impairment, which in turn helps to go beyond the refrains that people usually use to make sense of their impairments.
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