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Book Review
Title: Racialized Bodies, Disabling Worlds: stories Lives of Immigrant Muslim Women, by Parin Dossa, 2009
Publisher: Toronto, ON : University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 9780802095510 (paper), 9780802098177 (cloth)
Price: $24.95 (paper) ; $55.00 (cloth)
Description: 192 p.
Drawing on the stories of four immigrant with disabilities who live in Canada, this book attempts to begin building a bridge between disability studies and antiracist feminism. Author Parin Dossa correctly notes that, despite a shared set of oppressions that should make for common theorizing and activism, these sub-disciplines remain distinct from and alien to each other.
Dossa argues that these women's stories are embedded in and reflective of broad processes of exclusion and stigmatization. The first narrative is Mehrun's, a 48-year old woman with polio who came to Canada 20 years ago from Sudan. Her story is used to explore how disabled women are marginalized and erased under Canadian immigration systems that evaluate people on their productivity rather than valuing relationships and personal potential. Mehrun's story also illuminates the shortfalls of community inclusion and the effects of fragmented service systems and inadequate funding.
The second story is Tamiza's, who arrived in Canada from Tanzania in 1970, and is the professional working mother of two almost-adult children with disabilities born in Canada. Tamiza's narrative also illustrates issues of fragmented services, as well as the effects of a lack of information concerning entitlements, and the ways these shortfalls burden parents and extended family members. The third woman is Firouzeh, a paraplegic Iranian mother, who at fifty followed her husband to settle in Canada. Firouzeh's story is used to highlight the effects of colonialism and Western models of development on the lives of people with disabilities in the Middle East, ironies of gender and racialization in the immigration system, and the isolation and vulnerability to abuse (both domestic, and from the system itself) experienced by immigrant women with disabilities. Finally, Sara, who came to Canada as a refugee escaping domestic violence in Iran and became disabled after a car accident in Canada, provides a narrative that is used to illuminate the effects of poverty and socially irresponsible welfare policy on the lives of a racialized woman with disabilities.
While the four women's stories do illuminate multiple aspects of disablism, I have issues with the presentation of the narratives and with the analytical claims Dossa makes from them. First, the narratives used are often truncated, or spoken for (rather than through) the women, a strategy that does not sit well with feminist or post-colonial methodologies. Brief snippets of the women's voices are offered throughout the book, but these are often interspersed with dense theoretical sections that sometimes fail to affirm or acknowledge the actual words and meanings that seem to be conveyed by the women's quotes.
A second concern I have about this book stems from the divergent stories and situations of the women in the book. The inclusions of women with disabilities, mothers of children with disabilities, and women whose immigration experiences span some 20-30 years results in a range of stories and a range of concepts that are too broad to have been covered through these four stories. The book, as a result, makes claims about too many aspects of systemic marginalization on too many fronts, based on too few examples. This is compounded, unfortunately, by the difficulties endemic to unpacking which aspects of oppression are attributable to gender, to race, to immigration status, to poverty or to disability. For example, Tamiza's story is hauntingly similar to those in my own research with Canadian-born mothers of children with disabilities - fragmentation, lack of information, and uncaring professionals abound in the lives of most mothers of children who are different. Similarly, Mehrun's story of being institutionalized because her family was not supported in caring for her could unfortunately be told by many people with disabilities even today, regardless of immigration or racialization status.
I would have liked to hear more, and more directly from these women as to the interweaving of racialization, gender discrimination and disability oppression in their lives, and I suspect that a more careful and direct rendering would have produced a more convincing interpretive framing of these multiple forms of discrimination. Despite these shortcomings, however, I feel that Dossa's ambition of building a beginning bridge between feminist, disability studies and post-colonial analysis has been at least partially accomplished here, and for this reason alone the book is worth reading.
Review by
Claudia Malacrida, PhD
Claudia Malacrida is Associate Professor and University Scholar in Sociology at the University of Lethbridge
Email: claudia.malacrida@uleth.ca
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