Abstract
The development of modern medicine has turned the body in a privileged area of ​​intervention, providing healthcare professionals with decision-making power over what is or is not defined as normal. Thus, the body that transgresses the medically defined standard brings upon itself an analytical apparatus is mainly geared to its normalization. Consequently, in a patriarchal and strongly medicalized society, women with disabilities are subject to multiple discrimination as a result of sexism and disablism.

The emergence of disability studies marks the beginning of the questioning of this medical power. However, it was only in the 1990s that the greater difficulties disabled women face were considered. This translated into supplementing  the Social Model of Disability which had already proposed moving the analytical focus of disability, from an individual and particular issue (ie medical), to a structural stigma and prejudice issue (ie social and cultural), with regard to a society unable to accommodate diversity. In the wake of the political and theoretical proposal offered by the Social Model, stem Feminist Disability Studies, focusing particular attention to gender issues and personal experiences.

This presentation is the result of research developed under the project "Intimacy and Disability: sexual and reproductive citizenship of disabled women in Portugal".  With a  brief contextualization of different analysis models of disability and respective emancipatory potentials, the session focuses on innovative vision offered by Feminist Disability Studies re analysis of  themes of gender,  body and cultural representations, and on its potential for transforming a reality tainted by inequality and stigmatization of difference.

Bio notes

Ana Cristina Santos - Sociologist. She holds a PhD in Gender Studies, University of Leeds, UK, and an MA in Sociology, University of Coimbra, Portugal. She is a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra, and Honorary Research Fellow at the Birkbeck Institute for Social Research, University of London.

She has been involved in a number of research projects exploring issues of gender, sexuality, social movements, citizenship and human rights. She is Principal Investigator of a research project on disabled women and intimate citizenship funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology.

Vice-chair of the Sexuality Research Network of the European Sociological Association, Cristina is also an activit in the LGBT/queer and feminist movements in Portugal.

Significant publications include Cometi um Crime? Representações sobre (i)legalidade do aborto (Afrontamento, 2010), Bound and Unbound: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Genders and Sexualities (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), Estudos Queer: Identidades, Contextos e Acção Colectiva (Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais, 76, 2006) and A Lei do Desejo: Direitos Humanos e Minorias Sexuais em Portugal (Afrontamento, 2005).
Her most recent book is Social Movements and Sexual Citizenship in Southern Europe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

In 2013 she was awarded a 5 year Research Starting Grant by the European Research Council for her research on Citizenship, Care and Choice: The micropolitics of intimacy in Southern Europe.

Ana Lúcia Santos is a junior researcher at Centre for Social Studies in the research project “Disabled Intimacies: sexual and reproductive citizenship of disabled women in Portugal”. She has a degree in Philosophy at the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Coimbra and an MA in Feminist Studies from the same university with a thesis entitled “A sex which is many – the (im)possibility of the intersex as a human category”. Her research interests focus on feminist studies, intimate and sexual citizenship, crip theory and queer theory.