Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies - Current Issue

The relationships between neurodivergent and disabled communities, and healthcare practices, are marked by ambivalence. While there is a history of harmful and discriminatory practices, the clinical encounter also holds beneficial and empowering potential for neurodivergent and disabled people. To address this ambivalence, this paper’s central question is whether and how bioethical decision-making in healthcare settings can become more informed by critical insights from neurodiversity and disability studies. The bioethical debate in Western countries on early interventions for young autistic children will be the case animating my theoretical propositions. I provide a working definition of such a ‘disability approach to bioethics’ and review the obstacles in both mainstream bioethics and disability studies this approach has to overcome. Then, the ethical concept of vulnerability, its feminist reinterpretation, and its potential for disability bioethics are introduced. Instead of using the concept in its traditional, problematic sense, I propose that vulnerability can be reclaimed, or cripped, by neurodiversity and disability movements to do the exact opposite: to trouble the demarcation between the vulnerable and the invulnerable, to stress structural injustices over individual deficits, and to justify solidaristic, empowering interventions over paternalist ones. Finally, this ‘cripped account of vulnerability’ will be applied to the case of early autism intervention.

This article considers the ways in which the male life course in twentieth-century Britain can be reconstructed through individual personal pension files of British disabled ex-servicemen from the First World War. The files contain a range of documentation, including military enlistment and discharge forms, medical records, and correspondence from pensioners, their families, and other advocates. Close reading of five of these files explores pensioners’ changing experiences of health and disability. It examines men’s physical status as soldiers on enlistment, their ability to find work as physically or psychologically impaired ex-servicemen after the war, the significance of their status as husbands and fathers, and the effects of old age on their identity as men disabled in war. It argues that this ongoing engagement with the gendered legacies of war created a unique and important space in which the memory of the conflict was narrated.