"Jag gör henne bara en tjänst."

Betydelsen av kroppsnormativitet i förståelsen av kön, kroppslighet och sexualitet vid våld mot kvinnor med funktionshinder

Abstract

Gendered violence against disabled women is in many aspects a silenced issue both on the political agenda and in feminist research on gendered violence, despite the fact that disabled women are at a higher risk of being assaulted than abled-bodied women. Even if there are parallels between the ways that non-disabled and disabled heterosexual women are experiencing abuse and violence, there are also important differences. In the case of the latter, the abuse does not only occur in private settings by a known perpetrator (e.g. by a partner or a relative), but it also occurs in institutional settings and is perpetrated by professional carers who the disabled woman is expected to be able to trust; the perpetrators are consciously directing the physical as well as the psychological and emotional violence towards the impairment, which makes the abused woman even more vulnerable. Another important feature is the complexity of the different forms of violence, including socalled passive violence. The article is a critical discussion of the assumed impact of body normativity, which affects not only the societal status (in the margin and in different ways discriminated) but also the gender status (seen as non-gendered “objects”) of disabled women. Therefore the article underlines the important, but in the discussions related to gendered violence often neglected, impact of the cultural representations with focus on gender, corporeality and sexualities associated to being dis/abled in society. The author is critical of the tendency not to integrate non-disabled bodies and gender in the prevailing theories on violence and embodiment, and argues that concepts like normality, bodily limits as well as abjection need to be re-defined.