Rebecca Fish – författare

What is life like for women with learning disabilities detained in a secure unit? This book presents a unique ethnographic study conducted in a contemporary institution in England. Rebecca Fish takes an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on both the social model of disability and intersectional feminist methodology, to explore the reasons why the women were placed in the unit, as well their experiences of day-to-day life as played out through relationships with staff and other residents. She raises important questions about the purpose of such units and the services they offer.Through making the women’s voices heard, this book presents their experiences and unique perspectives on topics such as seclusion, restraint, and resistance. Exploring how the ever present power disparity works to regulate women’s behaviour, the book shows how institutional responses replicate women’s bad experiences from the past, and how women’s responses are seen as pathological. It demonstrates that women are not passive recipients of care, but shape their own identity and futures, sometimes by resisting the norms expected of them (within allowed limits) and sometimes by transgressing the rules. These insights thus challenge traditional institutional accounts of gender, learning disability and deviance and highlight areas for reform in policy, practice, methodology, and social theory.This ground-breaking book will be of interest to scholars, students, policymakers and advocates working in the fields of learning disability and disability studies more widely, gender studies and sociology.

The Routledge International Handbook of Feminist Disability Studies captures how discussions about disability have progressed since the 1990s, as well as grappling with the new debates over bodies and autonomy that are dominating various media today.Providing newly written chapters by scholars from both the global north and the global south, the book offers a mix of experiential, creative, and progressive content, combined with theoretical and political commentaries, to provide an eclectic and holistic immersion in feminist disability scholarship. It covers topics as diverse as societal barriers; access to public spaces; neurodiversity, activism; hate crime, bullying and ridicule; media and cultural analyses and representation of disabled women; structural issues such as poverty, policy and their relation to care/autonomy; mothering, both in terms of access to reproductive care and the re-emergence of eugenics, and care ethics of mothering disabled people; and madness, personality disorder and the provocations of the medical model, in terms of the imperative for ‘cure’ or ‘recovery’.This collection will be of interest to all scholars and students of disability studies, feminism, social work, cultural studies, human geography media, media studies and sociology.Chapter 15 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.