LITERATURE WRITTEN ABOUT WOMEN WITH DISABILITIES-WWDs PRESENT THEM AS ROLE-LESS AND ALSO BRINGS DISCRIMINATION AMONGST THEM

The disabled women also face discrimination amongst themselves mostly depending on the severity of their disabilities. These issues revolve around social dimensions like class, race, ethnicity, education, status(social) as well as sexual orientation. There are some writings that have been done by the disabled women themselves especially on their personal experiences like being women and having disabilities, some of the issues they present include isolation, desperation, poverty, being powerless, theses they express in anger and bitterness and they wonder why other people are celebrating achievements, their strength, happiness and also fulfillment inspite of the daily struggles.

The writings that have been done are seen to be talking about the different barriers that the disabled women face; the disabled women are seen to be worse off when compared to the disabled men and also the non disabled women. The disabled women lack economic security as well as social support and their access to sexuality and intimacy.

There is need to combine scholarly studies and feminist studies. This will help to explore the combined discrimination based on disability as well as gender. But the other challenge is that some writers have also presented the disabled women as roleless. And when the audiences here about this then they get new strength to discriminate against the disabled women and this leads to the stigma and discrimination that the disabled women face in the society today.

The role-less aspect that is attached to the disabled women comes as a result of the limited social roles available for them to undertake, there is also a very big absence of institutional means for disabled women to achieve adult roles thus making them to be treated as merely dependants who cannot even make decisions on their own including on matters affecting their own lives. The writers have also been biased when presenting issues facing the disabled women, we find that the writings are mostly done about women with physical disabilities, the women with mental or even those with developmental disabilities are not well represented and little if not nothing is written on their experiences.

The areas that need a lot of exploration are the reproductive and nurture, the education sector and also the employment area. These areas affect the disabled women more than they affect the disabled men or even the non disabled women in the society.