section_path: Disability in society/Societal norms/Intersections/Gender
section_name: Gender
paragraph_text: Gender
  
  The marginalization of people with disabilities can leave persons with disabilities unable to actualize what society expects of gendered existence. This lack of recognition for their gender identity can leave persons with disabilities with feelings of inadequacy. Thomas J. Gerschick of Illinois State University describes why this denial of gendered identity occurs:
  
  Bodies operate socially as canvases on which gender is displayed and kinesthetically as the mechanisms by which it is physically enacted. Thus, the bodies of people with disabilities make them vulnerable to being denied recognition as women and men.
  
  To the extent that women and men with disabilities are gendered, the interactions of these two identities lead to different experiences. Women with disabilities face a sort of "double stigmatization " in which their membership to both of these marginalized categories simultaneously exacerbates the negative stereotypes associated with each as they are ascribed to them. However, according to the framework of intersectionality, gender and disability intersect to create a unique experience that is not simply the coincidence of being a woman and having a disability separately, but the unique experience of being a woman with a disability. It follows that the more marginalized groups one belongs to, their experience of privilege or oppression changes: in short, a black woman and a white woman will experience disability differently.
  
  According to The UN Woman Watch, "Persistence of certain cultural, legal and institutional barriers makes women and girls with disabilities the victims of two-fold discrimination: as women and as persons with disabilities." As Rosemarie Garland-Thomson puts it, "Women with disabilities, even more intensely than women in general, have been cast in the collective cultural imagination as inferior, lacking, excessive, incapable, unfit, and useless."