Since the foundations of the contemporary anti-violence movement in the 1960s and 1970s, advocates have sought to establish a critical understanding of domestic violence that we can use to direct our efforts for social change. Yet many advocates and advocacy organizations continue to rely on a problematic narrative of sameness that marginalizes and erases diverse victims' experiences and needs. In this article, I conduct a critical discourse analysis of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence Web site to identify outcomes of this narrative for the inclusivity of advocacy efforts. I argue that despite the organization's numerous claims to represent diverse victims' experiences, Web site content reveals that its purportedly general account of domestic violence normalizes the experiences of a small group of victims-namely, heterosexual, cisgender women. Further, the Web site's content greatly limits the potential for thinking about and discussing violence across difference. I conclude with recommendations for changes in advocacy practices.
In this personal narrative, I reflect on how I have approached teaching about and for disability justice as a White crip feminist educator. I focus on how I have attempted to be accountable for my Whiteness in my teaching about an activist framework and movement grounded in the lived experiences of queer and trans disabled people of color (Sins Invalid, 2016). Towards this task, I describe my effort to enact what I term a harm reduction pedagogy or an approach to teaching that acknowledges the ongoing violence of whiteness and my participation in it while simultaneously striving to minimize the harm students of color experience in my courses. In the second section of this paper, I describe my process of accountability planning in which I anticipate possibilities for harm and prepare myself to respond to them prior to the moments when they happen.
In this paper, I critically reflect on my efforts to and experiences of integrating disability justice and crip theory into my intersectional, queer, feminist pedagogy. I begin by grounding my pedagogical practice in my experiences as an anti-violence advocate / activist in order to argue that disability theory and justice have the potential to not only expand anti-violence education, but also to transform it through careful attention to access, care, and interdependence. In this article, access refers to the possibilities of being fully present and supported within a given learning space; care describes the process of creating access through actions that make presence possible; and interdependence recognizes that access and care must co-exist because people need each other. I then identify parallels between anti-violence work and theories and movements against ableism because I have found this intersection to be pedagogically generative. Next, I describe what disability theory and justice, access, and crip politics (McRuer, 2006; Price, 2015) look like within the context of anti-violence education. In the second section of this paper, I write about how disability theory and justice brought to bear on anti-violence education can help to promote radical imagination and hope as well as deeper understandings of foundational concepts like consent. I also critically examine how anti-violence education can expand the possibilities of disability pedagogy through meaningful engagements with intersectional feminist theory and praxis. My purpose in developing these claims is to demonstrate the ongoing importance of bridging disability theory and justice with intersectional feminist practices of education.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.