Kamalawathie : gender, disability and leadership in Sri Lanka

This chapter addresses the significant gap in the disability leadership and activism literature by exploring the life journey of Kamalawathie, a key leader of the women with disabilities rights movement in Sri Lanka. Disability leaders in the Global South play a vital role in promoting social inclusion and safeguarding the human rights of all people with a disability, importantly through participation in politics to ensure that governments are making concerted efforts to implement disability policies. Leaders’ life stories are self-narratives that show how and why they enact desires and act in certain ways over time. Disabled women’s activism in the Global South emerges from spaces of community organizing and gender movements that have traditionally excluded disabled women. The nature of disability activism in the Global South is often presented as fragmented and under-resourced, in which collective mobilizations for change are driven by western ways of framing disability that tend to universalize minority experiences of disability.