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Racialized bodies, disabling worlds "they [service providers] always saw me as a client, not as a worker".

Dossa P

Department of Sociology/Anthropology, Simon Fraser University, 8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC, Canada V5A 1S6. pdossa@sfu.ca

This paper makes a case for a contextualized reading of intersecting constructs of disability, gender and race as they unfold in the everyday lives of immigrant women with disabilities. Taking the vantage point of Mehrun, a Canadian Muslim woman with polio, we show that the disability, gender and race constructs converge in some contexts and remain separate in others. This is an important consideration as it forestalls a situation where immigrant women's activist work is seen to be confined to the discrete sphere of their own communities. Mehrun's story of migration and settlement as well as her "work" on community integration of persons with disabilities (regardless of race or gender) is a plea for the civil rights of disabled people. At the same time, Mehrun's embodied reality as a racialized woman with disabilities suggests the possibility of making her marginality the epicenter of change.

Published 7 April 2005 in Soc Sci Med, 60(11): 2527-36.
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