Going beyond disability identity and creating communities of belonging : perception management and gendered disability advocacy

This chapter examines disability identity management in rural Southern postcolonial, post-war contexts and shows how disabled women negotiate the complexity of their gendered disability within their locally grounded struggles for political belonging. The analysis is centred on Kamalawathie, a leading gendered-disability advocate in Sri Lanka, whose lived experiences foreground her gendered and class position as a disabled woman to build solidarity with working-class disabled women. Her strategic orientations to her own performance of gendered-disability perception management is not only a form of resistance to gendered, able-bodied normative ideals, but is also a strategy to mobilize and organize effectively, particularly within the reality that women with disabilities in Sri Lanka face the harsh conditions of social and political exclusion. Disability perception management demonstrates the complex processes of disability identification and disidentification management within gendered-disability advocacy work in Sri Lanka.