“It’s Not That Way You Know, She Has a Good Future”: Women’s Experiences of Disability and Community-based Rehabilitation in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Purpose

This chapter focuses on the experiences of disabled Tamil and Sinhalese women in Sri Lanka.

Methods/Approach

Using fieldwork observations and in-depth interviews obtained through Community-Based Rehabilitation (CBR) programs over 13 months across four distinct districts in Sri Lanka, we examine complex sociocultural issues at the intersection of gender and disability.

Findings

These women’s narratives about their lives show the physical and social barriers related to the accessibility of everyday activities, and also the complex gender norms relating to social expectations to stay hidden from public view, contradictory messages around love and marriage, and reactions to and consequences of being disabled women in public.

Implications/Value

The results support calls to prioritize disabled voices in disability research in the Global South, which is currently dominated by a CBR approach in the name of “development.” These data also show the need to systematically address power relations currently at work in policies, practices, and communities that perpetuate disablement; document the need for communities and research to be more inclusive; and obligate scholars and practitioners to be more aware of how the CBR context may aim for development and change, yet often maintain highly gendered economic, political, and social processes of isolation. This project illustrates the ways in which careful attention to personal stories can illuminate complex socio-cultural processes. The chapter also brings voices of women in the Global South into the discourses on narratives and disability, both of which are dominated by perspectives from the industrialized west.

Citation

Britton, C.R. and Mauldin, L. (2019), "“It’s Not That Way You Know, She Has a Good Future”: Women’s Experiences of Disability and Community-based Rehabilitation in Sri Lanka", New Narratives of Disability (Research in Social Science and Disability, Vol. 11), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 27-42. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1479-354720190000011005