Feminism and the body politic

Female, racialised, and disabled bodies remain contested sites. Feminist jurisprudence has made significant advances in rendering women's bodily experiences legally legible. But it has not yet fully grappled with the relational and ubuntu dimensions of embodied flourishing: the ways in which bodily integrity, reproductive autonomy, freedom from violence, and access to healthcare are not merely individual rights but conditions for the communal becoming of 10 which each person is a part. This research strand develops a relational feminist theory oriented toward flourishing. Disability presses this case furthest. To be disabled is not to fall short of a norm of independent function but to live the truth that ubuntu states for everyone: that no one becomes alone. Relational feminism reads disability not as a deficit to be corrected but as another way of seeing, and asks what a world arranged for the becoming of every body and every mind would have to look like.