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Female Forms: Experiencing and understanding disability CAROL THOMAS, 1999
Buckingham, Open University Press xi, 175 pp, 16.99
ISBN 0-335-19693-4
In Female Forms: experiencing and understanding disability, Carol Thomas aims to show that disability theorists and activists ought to endorse a materialist feminist conception of disability. In Thomas's view, a materialist approach has the potential to best explain how the social relationships which constitute disability are generated and sustained within particular social and cultural formations (pp. 2, 60). She emphasises, however, that a materialist conception of disability must be informed by feminist perspectives, because disability is always gendered. In order to advance this argument, Thomas engages the claims of materialist disability theorists working within disability studies in the UK, as well as feminist perspective and post-modernist/post-structuralist analyses from both within and outside of disability studies. In so doing, Thomas invests the analytical work of British disability studies with a conceptual clarity and sophistication that much of the heretofore writing in the field has lacked. This is not to say that the book should be read only as an intervention into some of the emerging debates in disability studies; on the contrary, it should in addition be read as a genealogy of the British disabled people's movement and its reformulation of disability in the terms of the social model. For, as Thomas notes at the outset of her book, in the UK `the hallmark' of one's commitment to disability studies is some kind of adherence to the social model of disability, even if one is quite critical of it (p. 8).
Divided into three parts, the book is comprised of eight chapters whose discussions form a linear argument intended to convince readers to accept its central thesis. Among the topics which Thomas discusses in the chapters are these: the character and scope of disability, and its reconceptualisation in the social model; the gendered nature of disability; its materiality; and the importance of taking into account personal experience of impairment and disability. In order to demonstrate the transformative effects the social model has had on the lives of many disabled people living in Britain, and to illustrate her contention that disability is always `refracted through the prism of gender', Thomas draws upon the personal narratives of 68 British...