Modernity and its allied secular science placed the adult, European, bourgeois, heterosexual male body as the normative standard against which they compared ‘other’ bodies. In the state of being and becoming, the other bodies were negatively construed as ‘deviant’ and ‘inferior’. Such constructions and hierarchisation of embodiments have been used by colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy, formulating a common domain of consciousness to justify the subjugation of most of the world. Similarly, Imperial Feminism came up with its own normative formulation of womanhood that excluded several categories of women, such as non-Western and disabled women. In this way, international law and Imperial Feminism universalise powerful provincials while erasing the peripheral and thus rendering certain embodiments and their lived experiences illegible and untranslatable. Against this hegemonic normativity, TWAIL Feminism comes as an epistemic challenge that attempts to provincialise patriarchy and colonialism. While TWAIL as a movement and a discursive practice debunked the Eurocentric metanarratives of international law, it failed to address the question of patriarchy. TWAIL feminisms decentres Europe and simultaneously challenges patriarchy and the mainstay of liberal feminisms. The paper argues that the democratic episteme of TWAIL feminisms demands the inclusion of disfranchised women from the Global South within their epistemic fold, such as disabled women whose experiences remain foreign to the ontology of international law. It is incumbent upon TWAIL Feminism to ward off the exclusion of disabled feminist scholars who are often treated as marginal scholars within the discipline of legal philosophy. In this heuristic attempt, TWAIL Feminism must give space and voice to the marginal, disabled feminist voices by attempting to obviate epistemic and testimonial injustice against disabled women.
