Collective Organizing Among Women Living with Disabilities (WLD) to Address and Ensure Their Right to Health in Eastern Sri Lanka

This chapter is based on testimonies of women living with disabilities in Eastern Sri Lanka, documented by long-standing allies of the movement for the rights of women living with disabilities. The chapter describes the systemic hurdles and their everyday manifestations vis-a-vis the right to health among women living with disability in this region. The chapter shows the deeply ingrained structures that are a product of and also further reaffirms existing social stigma that invisibilizes and dehumanizes women who became disabled due to the prolonged civil war. While overall attention to the fundamental needs of people living with disabilities is far from adequate in Sri Lanka, this group is victimized further due to gender and ethnic identity. The chapter goes on to show modes of sustained collectivizing among this group of women across different linguistic and ethnic backgrounds. It illustrates how bringing awareness to the body and, by extension, health is essential to such organizing. The chapter proposes sustained organizing among women living with disabilities at the local and national levels, with minimal and strategic support from feminist allies. Such organizing would aim to change everyday lives and systemic barriers and increase women’s sense of self-worth individually and collectively. In a context where life and struggle are the same, women living with disabilities must know and feel that they are not alone.