Racialized Bodies, Disabling Worlds

In Racialized Bodies, Disabling Worlds, Parin Dossa explores the lives of Canadian Muslim women who share their stories of social marginalization and disenfranchisement in a disabling world. She shows how these women, who are subjected to social erasure in policy and research, define their identities and claim their humanity using the language of everyday life. Based on narrative ethnography, Racialized Bodies, Disabling Worlds makes a case for positive acknowledgement of perceived differences of nationality, religion, multiple-abilities, and gendered and race-based identities. It offers a powerful argument for bridging two disparate bodies of work: disability studies and anti-racist feminism. Most significantly, it shows how racialized Muslim women with disabilities are redefining the parameters of their social worlds and developing a distinctively pluralistic understanding of abilities. This ground-breaking work gives presence to the lives of people who are otherwise rendered socially invisible.