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Stuck in the land of disability? The intersection of learning difficulties, class, gender and religion
- Authors:
- BJORNSDOTTIR Kristin, TRAUSTADOTTIR Rannveig
- Journal article citation:
- Disability and Society, 25(1), January 2010, pp.49-62.
- Publisher:
- Taylor and Francis
This paper explores the contrast between the formal rights to full social inclusion of young adults with learning disabilities in Iceland to and their lived in experiences. The life history data used is presented fully elsewhere, as part of a wider doctoral project by the primary author on the role of cultural factors, gender and identity on young adults with learning disabilities. In this paper feminist intersectional theory is used to analyse the factors of gender, class and religion as well as those of disabilities. A framework based on five themes, ((1) historically and geographically contextual, (2) socially constructed, (3) power relationships that operate at, (4) the macro-social structural and micro-social psychological levels and are (5) simultaneously expressed) that characterise disability, class, gender and religion as interrelated systems of oppression is detailed by the authors in the bulk of this article’s text. The complex political, economic and ideological forces at play are discussed. This research demonstrates how the young adults with learning disabilities who participated as research collaborators in this study denied their devalued social construction and attempted to affirm themselves as competent social actors, thereby challenging existing social hierarchies.