Cripping Care: Gender, Disability, and the Medical Gaze in Naseema: The Incredible Story

Abstract

This paper examines the intersections of disability, gender, and healthcare in Indian women’s autobiographical writing, focusing specifically on Naseema: The Incredible Story by Naseema Hurzuk. It argues that such autobiographies challenge dominant biomedical discourses and offer alternative frameworks for understanding care, health, and agency. These narratives, often marginalized in mainstream medical or literary discourse, confront the clinic with stories grounded in emotional labour, gendered embodiment, and social resistance. Using the lens of disability studies and feminist narrative theory, this paper analyzes how  Hurzuk’s narrative articulates resistance against reductive medical gaze and reclaims narrative agency through lived experience. The text critiques ableist assumptions within both clinical and social settings, offering insight into the complexities of patient-hood and survival for disabled women in India.

By locating disability within socio-political contexts, Hurzuk’s story redefines recovery not as a return to normativity, but as an ongoing negotiation with structural barriers and inner resilience. In doing so, such narratives enact what scholars’ term “crip epistemologies,” proposing new a new ethics of care, rooted in interdependence, activism, and radical hope. This paper contributes to conversations in narrative medicine, feminist disability studies, and postcolonial health humanities by centering patient narratives that resist erasure and demand visibility.