Pac Rim 2009 Info
Noted Speakers: Katharina Heyer
Polly Arango | Fernando Cruz | Frank De Lima | Frank DeRuyter | Katharina Heyer | Cinda and Linea Johnson | David Johnson | Robert Mcruer | Leolinda Parlin | Tanya and Michelle Ponich | Joseph Ray | Suzanne Robinson | Loretta Ross | Dr. Neil Scott | Howard C. Shane | Charlotte Smith | Bethany Stevens | Damon Terzaghi | Amy Wilson
Monday May 4th, 2009: 10:15 AM – 11:15 AM in Lili’u Theater, on topic of Disability Rights and Girls and Women
“Disability and Feminism”
This presentation will be a conversation between feminism and disability, both as modes of inquiry and as foundations for radical politics. What happens when feminist theory meets disability studies? How do feminist and disability activists speak to each other, and what do they need to learn from each other? Our conversation will trace the ways both movements have adopted and adapted social justice and equal rights frames that originated with the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.
Biography: Katharina Heyer
People always ask me how I came to study disability rights. They never asked me that question when I was studying women’s rights and equality legislation! I am always happy to reply that it is feminist theory that brought me to disability studies. There is a compelling analogy to discrimination on the basis of sex and disability, and it made perfect sense to me to extend the feminist critique of gendered norms to the disability critique of ableism. Both critiques embody a radical and inherently necessary challenge of what we take as “normal” (and thus unexamined) in this world.
To that end I have studied the disability rights movement’s quest to adopt and apply the promise of equal rights and equal opportunities through law and politics. I began with the US movement to pass the Americans with Disabilities Act and then moved to examine its impact other disability rights movements across the globe. I focused on two countries with similar postwar histories and welfare-based approaches to disability politics: Japan and Germany because I wondered: how would an equality-based disability rights model fare in two countries with very different approaches to disability policy and legal remedies? My research thus investigates the ways that rights practices are moving across national and ideological boundaries. I ask: how do rights travel, and how are they transformed once they reach foreign shores? What does it mean to claim disability rights, and how does rights inform identity? Check out my findings in the publications section below!
My current research project examines a specific aspect of disability rights activism: the disability critique of a right to prenatal testing and of political and philosophical attempts to legalize physician assisted suicide (Rejecting Rights at the Beginning and the End of Life: Disability Rights, Prenatal Testing and Physician Assisted Suicide). This work analyzes the legal and political consequences of anti-rights rhetoric by a movement that is firmly grounded in a civil rights model.
I was born and raised in what was then the American Sector of a divided Berlin, Germany and then moved to the United States to pursue my undergraduate (B.A. in Government from Smith College, 1988) and graduate work (Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Hawai‘i, 2002), interrupted only by a three-year stint living and working in Japan. During my dissertation fieldwork I spent a year in Tokyo with the German Institute for Japanese Studies and two years on a dissertation fellowship at the American Bar Foundation in Chicago. Currently I am Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawai‘i where I teach classes in disability law (at the University of Hawai‘i Law School), disability politics, law and social movements, and Constitutional Law.
Publications: My German case study was published in Law and Social Inquiry (“The ADA on the Road: Disability Politics in Germany” 2002) and my Japan case study is featured in the inaugural issue of the Asia-Pacific Law and Policy Journal (“From Welfare to Rights: Japanese Disability Law,” 2000) as well as in a book chapter (“No One is Perfect: Disability and Difference in Japan” in Disability in the Foreign Language Classroom.) I examine the Americans with Disabilities Act as a model for disability employment law in other countries in “Rights or Quotas? The ADA as a Model for Disability Rights” (Handbook of Research on Employment Discrimination: Rights and Realities, 2005). I reviewed an important sociolegal study on disability and identity in “A Disability Lens on Sociolegal Research: Reading Rights of Inclusion from a Disability Studies Perspective.” Law and Social Inquiry 2007).
