Pushing the boundaries of our understanding of disability and violence: voices from the Global South (Guyana)

Abstract

Our knowledge about disabled people's lives is largely based on research in the Global North. This article considers disability and violence in the Global South, specifically in Guyana. It aims to push conceptual and empirical boundaries of our understanding of violence and disability. Conceptually, it argues for a social model materialist theory of disability attuned to how material barriers to disabled people's inclusion in society and space are reproduced through processes of exclusion unfolding across geographic scales ranging from the global, to the inter-personal and intra-personal. It argues that Lacanian psycho-analytic theory provides a complimentary lens for understanding why people engage in acts that construct disabled people as 'deserving' of violence. Empirically, the article broadens our understanding of disability and violence by focusing on poverty, violence as a cause of impairment and disability, and disabled women's and men's experiences of violence in a majority world context.

Disability and Poverty in the Global South

“…Despite the desire to have and sustain a relationship, most of the single women expressed suspicion when there were advances by men. The evidence my ongoing research and practice, in fact, sustains the notion that disabled women may well be more vulnerable to violence (see also Chouinard, 2012), intensified by and drawing from broader machismo and occasionally misogyny. Two women claimed they had been violently abused by their partners for years until the men eventually left.…”

“…The point above is critically important. The significance of work is bound to the fact that the poor have virtually no access to formal safety nets or social protection ensuring basic survival, which, following Chouinard (2012), is a gross manifestation of violence on the poor. In Guatemala, there is no universal social protection ensuring minimum safety nets (for example, means-tested benefits for all below a specific earnings level).…”

Disability studies and development geography: Empirical connections, theoretical resonances, and future directions

“…Employment is similarly a key area of concern for disabled people in rural Cambodia, where Alexandra Gartrell () found disabled people had difficulty finding work due to stigma, village infrastructure in rural areas, and the inaccessibility of new forms of employment in industrial and manufacturing sectors (see also Gartrell & Hoban, ). Vera Chouinard (, , ) also details, in her study in Guyana, how the continuity of colonial relations has contributed to disablement. For example, the country has limited resources to fund services due to under‐development and loses trained health professionals and rehabilitation volunteers in an “unjust health care subsidy to the health care systems of the [global] North” (Chouinard, , p. 356).…”

Precarious Lives in the Global South: On Being Disabled in Guyana

“…What is missing from her framework, however, is a conceptualization of why people often relate to people with impairments in ways that are socially and spatially marginalizing. Here a Lacanian psycho‐analytic approach, which emphasizes how encounters with disabled people threaten to bring anxieties about becoming disabled into subconsciousness and hence the tactics that people use to try to prevent psychic trauma from surfacing, provides another valuable complementary theoretical lens (see Chouinard ).…”