Disability histories trace power behind “deviance”

disability constructed – A new issue of L’Homme: European Review of Feminist History argues that disability has never been only a medical condition. Across witch persecutions, fascist eugenics, socialist aging policy, and far-right family rhetoric, disability is shown as something soc

On a global scale, 1.3 billion people (and counting) live with disabilities. Yet what’s striking in a recent issue of L’Homme: European Review of Feminist History is how far beyond bodies the story reaches. In an era shaped by a neoliberal order that prioritizes “competition and body optimization. ” the journal insists it’s crucial to explore the relationship between health and disability. The question that follows is not simple: what is “disability,” and who gets to decide?.

In recent decades, the focus has shifted away from treating disability as something inherent in the individual. Instead, it is framed as “the result of interactions between body, person and environment.” That distinction matters. Impairment is described as a person’s physical or biological condition. Disability. by contrast. is caused by societal barriers—barriers that can include “government intervention. social norms. institutional regulations or practical obstacles. such as a lack of (financial. medical or emotional) support. a lack of integration and even demonization or criminalization.”.

Disability history. as the issue presents it. is about the scaffolding around those barriers—especially “how disabilities have historically been constructed as deviance.” Feminist disability studies take an intersectional approach. grounded in the observation that disability and gender studies both deal centrally with power relations and inequalities. The articles that follow examine disability from women’s and gender history. using different examples to show how the boundaries between the body. society and discourse shift. and how disability can take on very different “faces.”.

The first faces arrive under early modern misogyny. Claudia Opitz-Belakhal writes that early modern witch persecutions were shaped by “the relationship between delusion. mania or melancholy. witchcraft and gender.” She points to the sixteenth-century physician Johann Weyer. among the first to propose a link between witchcraft and madness. In his account. accused witches were not criminals but “old women. melancholic. unable to control their senses.” Weyer drew on humoral medicine and argued that post-menopausal women were especially susceptible to melancholy and demonic illusions because of a dominance of “black bile.” Instead of execution. he insisted they needed proper religious instruction.

But Weyer’s attempt at mitigation collided with another interpretation. His contemporary. the jurist Jean Bodin. rejected the defence and portrayed witches as wilfully corrupt. arguing that women surrendered themselves to the Devil out of weakness and greed. These competing explanations intersected with wider misogynistic stereotypes: women were seen as “more gullible, superstitious and easily led” than men.

Opitz-Belakhal’s key point is that even when the medicalised portrayal of the “pitiable” elderly woman seemed compassionate. it still reinforced lethal connections—between femininity. irrationality and evil. Melancholy became a precursor to devil worship, contributing to the persecution and execution of thousands of women. The journal summarizes the logic in brutal clarity: “(Supposed) mental distress and illness thus became a deadly threat to those affected. a dis/ability in its most extreme form.”.

From there, the issue widens the lens to fascism. Dagmar Herzog situates disability history within histories of sexuality. gender and eugenics. arguing that debates over disability are also about social value and national identity. She writes that “bullying the weak has always been a hallmark of fascism.” In Herzog’s framing. the history of contraception and abortion “cannot be told without reference to the rise of eugenics. ” and the Holocaust is described as deeply connected to the persecution of disabled people.

Herzog is drawn to “the evidently powerful allure of eugenics. despite the inadequacy of its scientific premises. ” and to how discrimination towards disabled people persisted long after 1945. Raymond Williams’s concept of “structures of feeling” is offered as a way to explore “the emotional complexities” of disability—emotion as a historical force. not decoration.

Gender sharpens the story. Herzog notes that although the Nazis sterilized similar numbers of men and women. consequences for women were often worse because motherhood was considered “an essential aspect of womanhood.” More fundamentally. gendered ideas about “fitness for work” and sexuality shaped who was considered valuable or expendable. The issue closes this thread with a line that lands like a warning: “societies in which people with disabilities are treated with care and respect are also societies in which reproductive rights and sexual self-determination are the norm.”.

Age and (in)ability brings the same kind of scrutiny into socialist Bulgaria. Denitsa Nencheva shows how “the ageing process presented a challenge to the state.” It required “the effective. normative and ideological construction of social spaces for ageing individuals.” Government-issued medical journals. Nencheva writes. reinforced a narrative of “the abundant social policies and goods provided by the state to its people. ” while also “responsibilizing” individuals to remain productive members of society into old age.

Even socialist ideology’s promise of gender equality didn’t erase gendered expectations. Elderly men and women were still shaped by expectations tied to work, emotional behaviour and family responsibilities. Discussions of marriage and emotional life in old age were framed by state-centred ideas of collective welfare. Late-life marriage was positioned as socially beneficial and emotionally hygienic, rooted more in companionship than sexuality.

Here, the boundary work becomes explicit. Discourses around ageing and late marriage functioned as “regulatory tools. negotiating the boundaries of desire. care and autonomy in old age while reaffirming the gendered moral order that underpinned socialist visions of a healthy. productive and governable population.”.

The final face in the issue comes from the far right, through Austria’s Identitarian movement. Judith Goetz writes about the family role inside the movement and describes an idea of the “heteronormative. autochthonous” family as a “haven where traditional values can be protected against social change.” Goetz notes that even as groups like the Identitarians have modernised their ideology and language through social media strategies and concepts such as “ethnopluralism. ” their understanding of the family remains “deeply traditional and patriarchal.”.

In their framing. the white nuclear family becomes the “central pillar of society” and “the key mechanism for preserving ethnic and cultural continuity” against perceived threats such as migration. queer identities and liberal modernity. The family is portrayed as “simultaneously threatened and as a source of salvation.” That duality fuels a rhetoric of scandalization and crisis. White families are depicted as victims of multiculturalism and gender delusion. with inclusive education and LGBTQ+ visibility presented as forms of “indoctrination” that threaten the “natural” order. At the same time. the family is imagined as a solution to demographic decline. with women encouraged to have more children to resist the so-called “Great Replacement.”.

Taken together, the issue keeps returning to one uncomfortable pattern: disability rarely appears as a neutral category. Whether the setting is a courtroom. a medical journal. a eugenics debate. a socialist discourse on productivity. or a far-right argument about the “haven” of family values. the barriers that define disability are constructed through institutions and ideas—then enforced on bodies.

By placing women and gender histories at the center. L’Homme’s selection makes that construction feel personal even when it is historical. The boundaries between body. society and discourse—so often treated as abstract—end up deciding who is pitied. who is criminalized. who is deemed fit. and who is expendable.

disability histories L’Homme European Review of Feminist History feminist disability studies eugenics witch persecutions Austria Identitarian movement socialism aging gender and disability reproductive rights heteronormative family ethnopluralism