Abstract
This article proposes that a methodology of ‘haunting’ could be used by disability rights lawyers and disability law scholars to challenge structural injustice against disabled people. The author make this argument through the example of forced sterilization. Forced sterilization pursuant to eugenics laws in the United States during the early to mid-twentieth century is a profound injustice perpetrated on disabled people which is yet to be fully reckoned with and repaired. While eugenics sterilization laws have been repealed, and some states have additionally made public apologies and introduced compensation programs, forced sterilization of disabled people continues to be perpetrated pursuant to different laws. A methodology of ‘haunting’ surfaces experiences of long term, unresolved, and repressed social violence. By applying this methodology in the context of forced sterilization, disability rights lawyers and disability law scholars can expose and challenge legal temporalities of repeal and redress that sustain forced sterilization and its impacts, as well as center marginalized perspectives and lived experiences of forced sterilization, connect histories of eugenics sterilization to contemporary forced sterilization and other forms of legal violence, carceral control and intersectional oppression, and develop reparative legal pedagogies and professional practices.
Recommended Citation
Linda Steele,
STERILIZATION, HAUNTING AND THE FUTURE OF DISABILITY LAW,
34 J. L. & Pol'y
58
(2025).
Available at:
https://brooklynworks.brooklaw.edu/jlp/vol34/iss1/4
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