Ghai, Anita. (Dis)Embodied Form: Issues of Disabled Women. New Delhi, India: Har-Anand Publications, 2003. 180 pgs. ISBN 81-241-0930-3.

Reviewed by Nirmala Erevelles, The University of Alabama

(Dis)Embodied Form: Issues of Disabled Women is part of the Shakti Books Series in India focused on studies that "interrogate gender related issues from a variety of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives" (p. 7). Other books in the series discuss gender in the political contexts of communal violence, nationalism, religion, motherhood, and theater. Anita Ghai, author of (Dis)embodied Form, expands that knowledge base by providing a thoughtful and thorough text on the critical impact that the gendered politics of disability has on feminist theory and feminist transformative praxis.

In the Indian context, the inclusion of this book in the Shakti Books Series is noteworthy because it has occurred during what Ghai describes as the Indian Women's Movement's "structural amnesia" (p.16) about the particular concerns of roughly 35 million disabled Indian women, (p. 23) whom it often renders invisible. The explanation for such exclusion has usually been to foreground more pressing concerns of Indian feminists within a hierarchy of needs - a context within which disabled Indian women consistently lose. Ghai's book critiques the establishment of such hierarchies of oppression, and critically engages the social and political voids that she has experienced as a disabled female academic and activist in traditionally patriarchal Indian society.

The five chapters in the book are organized as a pedagogical guide to readers who are unfamiliar with the theoretical framework of Disability Studies, in general, and Feminist Disability Studies, in particular. Thus, the first chapter in the book rehearses the debates regarding definitions of disability (medical v. social v. aesthetic model); competing theoretical perspectives (modernist v. postmodernist; materialist v. idealist);and terminology (person with disability v. disabled person). To readers already familiar with these debates, the interesting sections of this chapter center around discussion of the Persons with Disabilities Act passed in India in 1995, which is ironically about equal opportunities, protection of rights, and full participation, and yet at the same time contains definitions of disability that Ghai notes are clearly inscribed in the medical model. These medicalized definitions, Ghai notes, are reminiscent of a certification process that supports a static definition of disability, such that in the 1990 census, the only disabled people counted in India were those who were certified as totally incapacitated. Ghai also discusses in this chapter the complexities of linguistic representations of disability when Indian culture (in this case Hindu mythology) and Indian politics collide with western theory.

Drawing upon narratives collected as part of a postdoctoral project on the lives of disabled Indian women, chapter 2 contains some of the most poignant discussions on living as disabled women in India, demonstrating both the commonalities and differences mediated by the specific cultural realities of disabled women in India and the West. It details the difficult experiences of living as a disabled girl in a culture that already sees girls as a liability. In Indian culture where arranged marriages are predominant, giving away a disabled woman in marriage is akin to proffering a "bad gift." This is different for disabled Indian men who as receivers of "gifts" often seek "normal" women as wives. Further, in a culture that privileges "legitimate" motherhood (p. 68), disabled Indian women are also prevented from being mothers. Additionally, genetic screening that allows for the abortion of female fetuses is only exacerbated when the fetus is disabled and is met by the silence of feminists — as it is not just in India, but globally. Similar to western disabled women, disabled women in India are also regarded as asexual, and yet in a violent irony, are often victims of sexual exploitation and abuse — which if detected in the Indian context is usually mired by silence. Such practices, Ghai argues, drawing on postcolonial theorists such as Memmi, Said, and Chandra Mohanty, constitute the disabled woman as devalued Other — "as 'not', as 'lack', as 'void'" (p. 79). Although this debilitating construction of alterity renders the disabled woman invisible, Ghai describes how disability gets used as an analogue for other kinds of oppression in the Indian context (e.g. being a woman is the biggest form of disability). However, as Ghai rightly points out the strategic advantage of this analogy is lost when the disabled subject continues to remain invisible.

Chapters 3, 4, and 5 go over the theoretical territory familiar to readers cognizant of the intricacies and debates within Disability Studies. To those readers who are unfamiliar with these debates, these three chapters provide a lucid and well integrated synthesis. Thus, Chapter 3 provides a lucid summary of the work of leading feminist scholars in Disability Studies such as Jenny Morris, Susan Wendell, Helen Meekosha, Rosemary Garland Thomson, Carol Thomas, and Marian Corker. Chapter 4 discusses the contemporary challenge in Disability Studies about theorizing disability as a social construct without ignoring the existential reality of disabled embodiment). Another critical issue that Ghai takes up in this chapter is the discussion of both the possibilities and pitfalls of identity politics from the standpoint of a Feminist Disability Studies. Finally, in Chapter 5, Ghai offers her position regarding the contributions that a Feminist Disability Studies would make in initiating "an inclusive discourse that would make universal sisterhood [within both the feminist and disability right movements] a distinct possibility" (p. 163).

In addition to its lucid discussion of the contemporary tensions between Feminist Theory and Disability Studies, another strength of this book is to be one of the first of its kind to document, however briefly, the embodied experience of being a disabled Indian woman and to demonstrate the ways in which these experiences challenge and transform both schools of thought. I wish, however, that the book capitalized on this strength much more deliberately. For example, in the section on the complexities of identity politics, I was hoping for a more sustained discussion on the relationship and distances between the "developing" and "developed" worlds — a discussion that would have emphasized in very concrete terms the differences and commonalities that make "universal sisterhood" in disabled feminist communities a genuine challenge. Additionally, although the first person narratives by disabled Indian women scattered throughout the book were useful in elucidating the tensions between feminism and disability, it would have been valuable analytically for readers to be privy to the context surrounding these interviews so that they their integration in the text would have appeared more seamless. Notwithstanding these, I would still recommend this book to both feminist and Disability Studies' scholars as an accessible and thought-provoking account of the critical issues pertaining to Feminist Disability Studies.