Honouring Professor Anita Ghai’s Legacy: Reflections by Professor Nivedita Menon

To cite this work: Menon, Nivedita (2025). Disability Dialogues — Honouring Professor Anita Ghai’s Legacy. Disability Dialogues. Sheffield: iHuman, University of Sheffield. 

Professor Nivedita Menon is a feminist scholar based in Delhi.

About three decades ago, Anita Ghai sought me out to have a conversation on disability, and that destablizing  conversation never ended. She began by challenging my unquestioning acceptance of limited prenatal testing for physical and mental “disability” in the context of the feminist campaign against prenatal testing for sex selective abortion. She forced me to think about how the eugenic acceptance of abortion on grounds of disability could extend to gender too.  Anita blew open my theoretical horizons by introducing me to the field of Disability Studies, to the idea of decentering disability from a medical to a social model, and to the idea that we are not divided between abled and disabled bodies, but that we all occupy a continuum of being Temporarily Abled Bodies. And that “disability” is produced less by the body itself than by spaces that exclude by assuming a particular kind of body to be the norm.

Her conceptualization of the idea of the “male stare” as it is directed towards the disabled female body, as opposed to the more common feminist understanding of the “male gaze”, is another conceptual shift that I found productive. What Anita was suggesting was that to be objectified by the male gaze is still to be produced within a framework of desire and sexuality, whereas the disabled female body, transfixed by the male stare, is an object in a different way – of revulsion and disgust. Through this framing, feminists are forced to  recognize a radically different aspect of the disabled woman than as the exploited, abused, oppressed body – that very body as expressive of (mostly thwarted) desire, sexuality and agency. The paradox in the Indian context, is that the de-sexualisation of the  disabled female body also excludes her from the usual familial protections against rape and sexual violence. The stark instance Anita offered is the way teenage girls with disability are exempted from the strict rules segregating young male and female cousins during vacations at family homes, for fear of adolescent sexual experimentation. Anita wrote that if there was a space crunch, the disabled young woman would be put into the same room as her male cousins, it being assumed that she could not possibly be within that nexus of illegitimate desire.

Finally, the most valuable lesson Indian feminists learnt from Anita is that the autonomy we prize may not be the foundation on which to build a new world, because autonomy is a highly individualist value. Rather, our feminist futures should celebrate interdependence and mutuality, for that is how feminists become strong, by building community and solidarities.