At the intersection of disability and masculinity: Exploring gender and bodily difference in India

Abstract

Despite a conventional view that bodily impairments are necessarily interpreted as emasculating and negative, this article – drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with men affected by leprosy and by cerebral palsy (CP) in India – offers a more nuanced account of how disabled men negotiate their gendered identities. Different kinds of impairments have very specific, context-defined, meanings that, in turn, have different implications for how gender and disability might intersect. Rather than diminishing masculinity in all instances – some bodily differences, as the article demonstrates, might even be enacted as hyper-masculine – impairments are shown rather to reshape understandings of the masculine in sometimes unexpected ways. And while my informants were constrained both by ableist norms and by the biological limitations of their own bodies, ambivalence towards certain forms of masculinity also afforded them space to perform their identities more creatively, sometimes to potentially positive effect.