The MacArthur model of successful aging encompasses three principal components: low risk of disease and disease-related disability; maintenance of high mental and physical function; and continued ...engagement with life, which includes relations with others and productive activity, either paid or volunteered. In the 27 years since we first articulated the core principles of the model, it has received sustained attention in gerontological theory, empirical research, and practice (Rowe & Kahn, 1987, 1997, 1998). Adapted from the source document.
What is a crip politics of bodymind? Drawing upon Rosemarie Garland-Thomson's theory of the misfit, I explain my understanding of crip and bodymind within a feminist materialist framework, and argue ...that careful investigation of a crip politics of bodymind must involve accounting for two key, but under-explored, disability studies (DS) concepts: desire and pain. I trace the turn toward desire that has characterized DS theory for the last decade, and argue that while acknowledging disability desire, we must also attend to the aspects of disability, including pain, that are sometimes bad. Although I don't argue that pain is always and only bad, I call for recognition of the ways pain complicates disability desire, as well as the possibilities it opens for specifically located, collective forms of care.
Cripping Girlhood offers a new theorization of disabled girlhood, tracing how and why representations of disabled girls emerge with frequency in twenty-first century U.S. media culture. It uncovers ...how the exceptional figure of the disabled girl most often appears as a resource to work through post-Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) anxieties about the family, healthcare, labor, citizenship, and the precarity of the bodymind. In paying critical attention to disabled girlhood, the book uses feminist disability studies to rupture the unwitting assumption in girls’ studies that girlhood is necessarily non-disabled. By closely examining the ways that disabled girls represent themselves, Anastasia Todd goes beyond a critique of the figure of the privileged, disabled girl subject in the national imagination to explore how disabled girls circulate their own capacious re-envisioning of what it means to be a disabled girl. In analyzing a range of cultural sites, including YouTube, TikTok, documentaries, and GoFundMe campaigns, Todd shows how disabled girls actively upend what we think we know about them and their experience, recasting the meanings ascribed to their bodyminds in their own terms. By analyzing disabled girls’ self-representational practices and cultural productions, Todd shows how disabled girls deftly theorize their experiences of ableism, sexism, racism, and ageism, and cultivate communities online, creating archives of disability knowledge and politicizing other disabled people in the process.
In this article, we combine aspects of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Disability Studies (DS) to propose a new theoretical framework that incorporates a dual analysis of race and ability: Dis/ability ...Critical Race Studies, or DisCrit. We first examine some connections between the interdependent constructions of race and dis/ability in education and society in the United States and why we find it necessary to add another branch to Critical Race Theory and Disability Studies. Next, we outline the tenets of DisCrit, calling attention to its potential value as well as elucidate some tensions, cautions, and current limitations within DisCrit. Finally, we suggest ways in which DisCrit can be used in relation to moving beyond the contemporary impasse of researching race and dis/ability within education and other fields.
Recently there has been discussion about the emergence of critical disability studies. In this paper I provide an inevitably partial and selective account of this trans-disciplinary space through ...reference to a number of emerging insights, including theorizing through materialism, bodies that matter, inter/trans-sectionality, global disability studies, and self and Other. I briefly disentangle these themes and suggest that while we may well start with disability, we often never end with it as we engage with other transformative arenas including feminist, critical race and queer theories. Yet critical disability studies reminds us of the centrality of disability when we consider the politics of life itself. In this sense, then, disability becomes entangled with other forms of oppression and revolutionary responses.
The editors survey the theoretical frameworks of feminism and disability studies, locating the points of overlap crucial to a study of disability and mothering. Organized in five sections, the book ...engages questions about reproductive technologies; diagnoses and cultural scripts; the ability to rewrite narratives of mothering and disability; political activism; and the tensions formed by the overlapping identities of race, class, nation, and disability. The essays speak to a broad audience—from undergraduate and graduate students in women’s studies and disability studies, to therapeutic and health care professionals, to anyone grappling with issues such as genetic testing and counseling, raising a child with disability, or being disabled and contemplating starting a family.
In 1999, only 20 studies in the public health literature employed instruments to measure self-reported experiences of discrimination. Fifteen years later, the number of empirical investigations on ...discrimination and health easily exceeds 500, with these studies increasingly global in scope and focused on major types of discrimination variously involving race/ethnicity, indigenous status, immigrant status, gender, sexuality, disability, and age, separately and in combination. And yet, as I also document, even as the number of investigations has dramatically expanded, the scope remains narrow: studies remain focused primarily on interpersonal discrimination, and scant research investigates the health impacts of structural discrimination, a gap consonant with the limited epidemiologic research on political systems and population health. Accordingly, to help advance the state of the field, this updated review article: (a) briefly reviews definitions of discrimination, illustrated with examples from the United States; (b) discusses theoretical insights useful for conceptualizing how discrimination can become embodied and produce health inequities, including via distortion of scientific knowledge; (c) concisely summarizes extant evidence—both robust and inconsistent—linking discrimination and health; and (d) addresses several key methodological controversies and challenges, including the need for careful attention to domains, pathways, level, and spatiotemporal scale, in historical context.
Based on resilience theory, this paper investigates the influence of key health indicators and risk and protective factors on health outcomes (including general health, disability, and depression) ...among lesbian, gay male, and bisexual (LGB) older adults.
A cross-sectional survey was conducted with LGB older adults, aged 50 and older (N = 2,439). Logistic regressions were conducted to examine the contributions of key health indicators (access to health care and health behaviors), risk factors (lifetime victimization, internalized stigma, and sexual identity concealment), and protective factors (social support and social network size) to health outcomes, when controlling for background characteristics.
The findings revealed that lifetime victimization, financial barriers to health care, obesity, and limited physical activity independently and significantly accounted for poor general health, disability, and depression among LGB older adults. Internalized stigma was also a significant predictor of disability and depression. Social support and social network size served as protective factors, decreasing the odds of poor general health, disability, and depression. Some distinct differences by gender and sexual orientation were also observed.
High levels of poor general health, disability, and depression among LGB older adults are of major concern. These findings highlight the important role of key risk and protective factors, which significantly influences health outcomes among LGB older adults. Tailored interventions must be developed to address the distinct health issues facing this historically disadvantaged population.
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