Women with Disabilities Have been Misfitting in Canada’s Foreign Policy for Thirty Years |
At the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, hundreds of women with disabilities arrived to find uneven terrain, stairs without alternatives, no sign language interpretation, and no funding for attendant care. That gap between the environment policymakers imagine and the reality of the bodies that inhabit it is what feminist disability scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson calls “misfitting”. For thirty years, that discrepancy has defined the relationship between women with disabilities and Canada’s global policies.
I argue that feminist disability activists have been the ones driving change. In my research, I have traced three encounters in which Canadian women with disabilities used the knowledge that comes from misfitting to push their way into policy spaces that had not imagined them, and, in doing so, reshaped those spaces.
Beijing and Its Afterlife
Attendance estimates suggest that somewhere between 200 and 400 women with disabilities showed up to both the NGO Forum and the official conference. Canada funded forty women to attend the Forum through the Canadian Beijing Facilitating Committee; five were women with disabilities. When the barriers at the venue became impossible to ignore, women with disabilities organized protests that drew international media coverage. Attendees recalled that journalists took women’s disability rights seriously, covering the struggle as a fundamental human rights matter rather than the usual superficial human interest piece.
The Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action mentioned women with disabilities thirty-two times, mostly in passing lists of marginalized populations. The International Disability Alliance later acknowledged that while many of those mentions lacked real substance, getting women with disabilities into the document at all represented meaningful progress. More durable than the document were the relationships built in Beijing. Canadian disability advocates who returned home pushed into post-conference meetings where disability was not on the agenda, demanding that women’s organizations account for them. That persistence carried forward: by the time of the Beijing +25 and +30 review processes, organizations like DAWN Canada and the Council of Canadians with Disabilities had ensured that the civil society review of Canada’s BPfA implementation included disability-specific analysis as a core section.
Cross-Sector Research and the Encounter with Government
Canada ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) in 2010. In 2017, it introduced a Feminist International Assistance Policy (FIAP) intended to bring an intersectional feminist lens to Canadian foreign policy. Neither fully addressed what women with disabilities needed. The FIAP recognized the diversity of women but fell short by treating people with disabilities mainly as populations in need of protection, rather than as agents with rights and expertise. In 2020-2021, roughly 5 percent of GAC’s international assistance funding went to projects at the intersection of gender and disability, and most of those took a medical or rehabilitation approach rather than investing in leadership.
The cross-sector partnership I direct, Engendering Disability-Inclusive Development (EDID-GHDI), was established in 2020 to co-create and share knowledge about the rights of women with disabilities, with partners in Canada, Haiti, South Africa, and Vietnam. One of the partnership’s most significant moments came in December 2022, when DAWN Canada, EDID-GHDI, and GAC brought together a two-day policy forum drawing more than a hundred government officials, researchers, and civil society representatives. The forum was designed for access: both in-person and remote participation, bilingual delivery, and sign language interpretation in ASL and LSQ alongside captioning. GAC assistant deputy minister Cheryl Urban opened by recognizing DAWN Canada’s standing as a credible, representative voice for women and girls with disabilities, a modest but notable acknowledgement from a senior official.
Key recommendations included dedicated funding for disability inclusion within gender equality programming, stronger financial support for locally led organizations of women with disabilities, and systematic collection of disability data broken down by sex and age. Several of these recommendations have since surfaced in the pledges Canada made at the Global Disability Summits in 2018 and 2022.
Women with disabilities have not waited for governments to come around. The Global Forum on the Leadership of Women with Disabilities (GFLWD), co-led by Bonnie Brayton of DAWN Canada and Abia Akram of STEP in Pakistan, brings together twenty-seven women leaders from twenty-two countries. Research by Dominique Masson and Clothilde Parent-Chartier on how women with disabilities are represented across UN bodies found that the GFLWD stands alone as a network operating transnationally at this scale.
The GFLWD positions women with disabilities as experts and leaders, not as subjects of charity or welfare. It has built communication practices designed to level the technological playing field across member countries, and has engaged with bodies working on the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction and the Sustainable Development Goals. But the forum runs largely on the unpaid labour of women who already carry full-time responsibilities in their home countries. As governments slash international development budgets, “leave no one behind” keeps circulating in official statements without the resources to back it up.
Recognition Without Redistribution
The women who were present in Beijing, who pushed into post-conference meetings, who built EDID-GHDI and the GFLWD, have been doing exactly what Garland-Thomson’s concept of misfitting predicts: using the experience of exclusion to force environments to change, asserting their right to occupy public space on equal terms. Canada’s foreign and global policies are meaningfully more attentive to women with disabilities than they were in 1995.
But recognition without redistribution does not end misfitting. It names it. The participation of women with disabilities in these encounters, and the knowledge they have produced, have not been matched by the material supports required for genuine accessibility and inclusion. The earmarked funding, the disaggregated data collection, the sustained support for organizations led by women with disabilities — none of it has followed the rhetoric of inclusion. Canada has acknowledged the gap, but closing it is a different commitment.
Deborah Stienstra latest article, “Bringing Feminist Disability Knowledge to Canada’s Global Policies,” is published in International Journal and available here.