Embodiment, Ableism, and Age: A Qualitative Study on Gynecological Health Among Elderly Women With Disabilities in Rural Bangladesh

In countries with LMIC status, women with disabilities often experience limited access to healthcare, and the reality is even worse, particularly for older women with disabilities. Systematic social and institutional processes, especially in many rural and low-resource contexts, render their bodies invisible and unworthy of care within reproductive and gynecological health systems. These people’s embodied experiences of aging and disability are often overlooked in dominant understandings of women’s health, which leads to gaps in care, recognition, and support. This study explores how rural elderly women with disabilities make sense of their gynecological health, and how experiences of aging, disability, gender, and rural marginality shape their encounters with care and dependency relations. A qualitative study was conducted using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA). In-depth semi-structured interviews were carried out with four elderly women with disabilities and three primary caregivers in rural Sylhet, Bangladesh. Participants were selected through purposive and snowball sampling. Interviews were transcribed, translated, and analyzed ideographically to identify emerging themes across cases. Four superordinate themes were identified: (a) “isolated and not desired”— highlighting the elderly women’s unwillingness to show themselves in public spheres as well as describing experiences of social withdrawal and emotional exclusion; (b) “do not get treatment for disability, let alone women’s diseases”— demonstrating the invisibility of women’s healthcare needs within the hypervisibility frame of their bodily status; (c) overemphasizing on physical and aged condition, which demonstrates that their necessity for sexual health is often ignored because of exaggerated embodiment and age. They are hyper-visible as “old” and “disabled” and less acknowledged as women; and (d)“death can be a release”— reflecting embodied suffering and perceptions of life as burdensome within caregiving and social structures. The findings show how aging and disability intersect to shape the social visibility of women’s bodies, which often causes their gynecological health needs to go unrecognized or be deprioritized. The study contributes to feminist disability scholarship by showing how care inequalities are produced through intersecting structures of gender, age, disability, and rural marginality.