Editing Disability (section)

===== Gender =====
The marginalization of people with disabilities can leave persons with disabilities unable to actualize what society expects of gendered existence. This lack of recognition for their gender identity can leave persons with disabilities with feelings of inadequacy. Thomas J. Gerschick of [[Illinois State University]] describes why this denial of gendered identity occurs:<ref>{{cite journal|last1=Gerschick|first1=Thomas|title=Towards a Theory of Disability and Gender |journal=Signs|date=Summer 2000|volume=25|issue=4|pages=1263–68|jstor=3175525|doi=10.1086/495558|s2cid=144519468}}</ref>
{{Blockquote|text=Bodies operate socially as canvases on which gender is displayed and kinesthetically as the mechanisms by which it is physically enacted. Thus, the bodies of people with disabilities make them vulnerable to being denied recognition as women and men.}}
To the extent that women and men with disabilities are gendered, the interactions of these two identities lead to different experiences. Women with disabilities face a sort of "double [[social stigma|stigmatization]]" in which their membership to both of these marginalized categories simultaneously exacerbates the negative stereotypes associated with each as they are ascribed to them. However, according to the framework of intersectionality, gender and disability intersect to create a unique experience that is not simply the coincidence of being a woman and having a disability separately, but the unique experience of being a woman with a disability. It follows that the more marginalized groups one belongs to, their experience of privilege or oppression changes: in short, a black woman and a white woman will experience disability differently.<ref>{{cite book |chapter="When Black Women Start Going on Prozac ..." The Politics of Race, Gender, and Emotional Distress in Meri Nana-Ama Danquah's Willow Weep for Me |date=May 2, 2013 |editor=Lennard J. Davis |title=The Disability Studies Reader |pages=415–435 |publisher=Routledge |doi=10.4324/9780203077887-41 |isbn=978-0-203-07788-7}}</ref>

According to The UN Woman Watch, "Persistence of certain cultural, legal and institutional barriers makes women and girls with disabilities the victims of two-fold discrimination: as women and as persons with disabilities."<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.un.org/womenwatch/enable/|title= Feature on Women with Disabilities|last=WomenWatch |website=UN |access-date=October 24, 2017|archive-date=September 28, 2017|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170928042447/http://www.un.org/womenwatch/enable/|url-status=live}}</ref> As Rosemarie Garland-Thomson puts it, "Women with disabilities, even more intensely than women in general, have been cast in the collective cultural imagination as inferior, lacking, excessive, incapable, unfit, and useless."<ref>{{cite journal|date=Winter 2005|title=Feminist Disability Studies|doi=10.1086/423352|journal=Signs|volume=30|issue=2|pages=1557–87|last1=Garland-Thomson|first1=Rosemarie|s2cid=144603782}}</ref>