Meggie Boyle

Disabled women remain critically underrepresented in cultural and critical discourse, their experiences, knowledge, and ways of being in the world consistently overlooked. Whilst strides have been made in theorisations of other minority subjectivities, disability lags considerably behind. Meggie’s research addresses that gap by centring disabled women's voices, exploring the ways in which they exceed patriarchal, paternalistic, and medicalised frameworks of valuing life. It is particularly interested in how disabled female subjectivities interact with, and trouble, normative femininity – especially in relation to desire and desirability, and the reproductive and maternal scripts which continue to shape idealised femininity in the contemporary. 

Drawing on queer-feminist phenomenology, crip theory, and affect theory, her research attends to how the world unfolds through the first-person perspectives of the disabled subject, and how this unsettles normative space, time, and embodiment. Her project remains attentive to the intersectional nuances which mediate and compound disabled women's experiences.

Ultimately, this work insists on the capaciousness, creativity, and resilience of disabled women's lives; on their power to thrive in aspects of existence fundamental to us all; crucially in spite of the world, not because of it.

Publications 

‘Everyone Should Be Talking About This: Disability and Care’, Paragraph, Special Issue: ‘Thinking Care in the Twenty-First Century’, edited by Jasmine Cooper and Katie Pleming, 48:2, July 2025

‘Tender Disruptions: Disabled Desire and the Radical Power of Intimacy Across Literature and Screen’, Routeledge, Special Issue: ‘Disability and Sexuality: The Power of Crip Disruption’, edited by Alan Martino, forthcoming June 2027 

Conferences 

‘‘[She] Was What Life Was’: Re-imagining Care in No One Is Talking About This (2021)’, Communities of Care Symposium, New York, April 2025

‘Transforming Conceptions of Aliveness: The Disabled Child in Clara Dupont-Munod’s S’Adapter (2021)’, Women in French Conference, Leeds, May 2025         

Beyond the “Healthy Baby”: Cripping Reproductive Justice in Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This (2021)’, Cripping Reproductive Justice Symposium, Barcelona, October 2025

‘The Weight of Water: Disability, Fluidity, and the Politics of Immersion’, Fluidity: Water's Perpetual Shapelessness, Georgetown, November 2025 

‘Tender Disruptions: Disabled Desire and the Radical Power of Intimacy Across Literature and Screen’, Sexuality, Disability, and the Power to Disrupt Conference, online, February 2026

‘Learned Adjustment: Rethinking Disability and Animal Kinship’, 4th International Online Conference on Animals, online, March 2026

‘The Paradox of Hypervisibility: Disabled Dancers and the Politics of the Gaze’, 5th Annual Symposium for Disability and Accessibility at Yale, New Haven, April 2026 

‘Rewriting Monstrosity: The Contested Space of Disabled Performance’, Monstrous Bodies: From Frankenstein to the Posthuman, Madrid, April 2026

‘Mothering Otherwise: Crip Autobiography and the Rewriting of Maternal Subjectivity’, From Stabat Mater to Mater Movens: Analysing Discourses on Motherhood, London, forthcoming June 2026

‘A New Corporeal Language: Disabled Dancers and the Transformation of Aesthetic Possibility’, What Theatre Does: Doing Performance and Disability, Melbourne, forthcoming July 2026