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This paper explores the experiences of immigrant women with visual impairment in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA) of Canada. Conceptually, the paper draws from feminist disability theory and critical scholarship on blindness to consider the discursive and material processes shaping women’s experiences across different socio-cultural contexts. Empirically, the paper draws from in-depth interviews with seven women. The analysis is organized around three themes. The first explores women’s understandings of visual impairment. The second examines the ways in which women’s experiences of visual impairment are shaped by meanings and attitudes that circulate within their cultural communities, and the extent to which immigration might challenge or reinforce these meanings. The third examines the shifting barriers and opportunities women face with respect to social and economic participation. We close by identifying the conceptual implications of our research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I use psychoanalytic theory to look at the meaning of disability within an ableist culture, and its relationship to issues of sexuality and death. I suggest that while disability has not been a central focus of psychoanalysis, it has been employed to stand in for something else, and this has had important implications for disability that have yet to be fully explored. Particular emphasis is placed on the use of disability as a 'symbolic substitute' for castration as conceived by Freud and Lacan, and the implications of this formulation for the cultural construction of disabled bodies as lacking. While there is cause for continued caution with respect to this theoretical tradition, psychoanalysis offers important insight into the complex origins of 'aesthetic anxieties' that surround disability within ableist culture, and the way in which these emotions are implicated in the geographic exclusion of 'different' bodies. In particular, psychoanalysis helps to demonstrate the illusory nature of the 'able-body' as a key source of oppression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]