For example, in her social relational model of disability, Thomas (1999, 60 emphasis added) redefines disability as “a form of social oppression involving the social imposition of restrictions of activity on people with impairments and the socially engendered undermining of their psycho-emotional well-being.” Thus, “disability” is reimagined to have political, material, economic, structural, emotional, intimate, and personal dimensions. While social model orthodoxy holds the psychological “as epiphenomenal, diversionary, and potentially misappropriated in the buttressing of pathologising accounts of disablement” (Watermeyer 2009, iii), feminist authors-markedly Thomas (1999), and later Reeve (2002)-have argued for the inclusion of the psychological and emotional dimensions of disability and impairment within disability studies (see also Goodley 2011). Much of this critical scholarship has been through writing openly about their own embodiment, intersectional identities, and lived experiences of impairment (see Morris 1989 Wendell 1996 Thomas 1999), causing what Sherry (2004, 776) called a crucial “deconstruction of the public/private divide.” The consequences of this, Shakespeare (1999, 54) argues, have been the marginalisation of disabled people’s sexual politics and the omission of the “personal and individual dimensions of oppression.” Feminist authors within disability studies have challenged these important omissions, and have at the same time located gender and other social categories within analyses of disability (Baron 1997 Thomas 1999). The oppressions experienced by disabled people in their sexual and intimate lives have long been overshadowed by wider rights for their rightful place within civil and public life (Shakespeare, Gillespie-Sells, and Davies 1996).
THE WORK OF DISABLED IDENTITIES IN INTIMATE RELATIONSHIPS
SOC 356 article: “The Work of Disabled Identities in Intimate Relationships” by Kirsty Liddiard