Reviewed by Kate Champlin
Content Warnings: Euthanasia, ableism, explicit references to sex and sexuality, and legal discrimination
Disability Intimacy is a joyous explosion; it combines poems, photographs, and reproductions of other visual artworks with essays, interviews, and one excerpt from a touring play. The works flow together through shared themes and common issues and are not governed by a single form or critical approach. Best of all, Wong’s chosen contributors define intimacy in many possible ways. The collection is divided into sections on love and care, pleasure and desire, and creativity and power. However, the work as a whole builds on each of these themes to explore love, creation, and touch in a diverse variety of forms. These include some forms that readers or the mainstream media may not expect. As several of the collection’s authors note, disabled life often involves communication of needs and creative personalization of accommodation strategies. It should be no surprise that crip love and crip sex also involve negotiation, personalization, and adaptation.1 Disability Intimacy reflects these expansive definitions. The works in this collection are as sensual as the taste of champagne and fancy potato chips, as intimate and loving as a nationwide Zoom protest, and as quietly companionable as a mutual orgasm.
Intimacy, tenderness, sex, and desire mark each of the works in the collection. Jade T. Perry discusses the exclusion she suffers at kinkster parties. While the kink community serves one of her needs and preferences, the same community ignores her requirements for immune-care and extra attention to disease transmission. Robin Wilson-Beattie describes reclaiming her fat, disabled body through her work as a sensual domme. She recalls deriving immense power from communicating her desires and from adapting sex play to her disabilities. Sami Schalk discusses her work as a pleasure artist. She reclaims her body—and spreads the message of reclaiming selves through pleasure—through intimate photographs, deliberate acts of self-care, and vivid clothing. Schalk calls one outfit her “unicorn space princess look” (169). This outfit features silver shorts, a unicorn headband, and purple wings. Schalk’s photographs are at once remarkably erotic and deeply intimate. One image shows her holding her breasts while in an outdoor shower. Schalk says that she enjoyed the contrast between the warm sun and the cold water; those who view the photograph will likely perceive and share in this enjoyment. Kennedy Healy chronicles her bond with valued and politically-active personal assistant Marley Molkentin through a photo essay. One particularly evocative photo depicts Marley’s hands carefully drying Kennedy’s face. Kennedy’s closed eyes and half smile show her trust in Marley. Yomi Sachiko Wrong discusses her physical bond with a foster infant, a bond solidified through the scent of the child’s hair and the sounds she makes to express physical needs.
Moreover, while every work is a unique experience, several themes recur in the collection. One example of this recurrence is the assertion that bonds of love, care, and self can extend beyond traditional, expected, or human communities. Emilie L. Gossiaux discusses her bond with her first guide dog, London, and the drawings and sculptures inspired by that bond. Gossiaux’s works include “Dancing with London.” In this sculptural installation, two life-size Londons stand on their hind legs with their front paws outstretched. Both sculpted figures invite visitors to grasp London’s paws and step into the artist’s place in the dance. When London was younger, Gossiaux frequently shared dances with her dog, who enjoyed wagging her tail to Grimes and Le Tigre. Another sculpture, “True Love will Find You in the End,” depicts the artist holding hands with her guide dog and also merging with her. Both figures, Gossiaux and London, have human and canine features. Pelenakeke Brown discusses her dance performances. She describes the Sāmoan traditions that inspire and guide her performances and the community of fellow artists and technicians who make these performances possible. She also discusses her cane’s role in the performances and as an extension of her self. In one routine, Brown’s cane twirls around her so that it seems to be the one dancing. In “Profoundly Together,” The Redwoods write about their lives as plurals (multiple individuals or alters living in one body) and the intense bonds of love and communication that hold a system (the group of all individuals in the body) together. The Redwoods live as a community in a single body, taking turns interacting with the outside world, negotiating to make decisions, and regularly checking on each other’s emotional health.
Legal and legalized discrimination form a second theme in the collection. Reading some parts of this anthology may feel like intimate contact with a razor blade or a blowtorch. Gabrielle Peters describes a protest against Canada’s MAiD (medical assistance in dying) legislation and its 2021 expansion. This euthanasia program is rapidly expanding to include the legal deaths of disabled children, depressed adults, and those whose primary “problems” are ableism or economic discrimination. The essay is primarily about Peters’ tentative friendship with the protest’s middle-class organizer and the gaps between middle-class and working-class cultures. Peters also describes a remarkably creative protest, a “filibuster” where protesters occupied social media channels to present poems, tell stories, or burn their copies of the law on camera. (This outpouring of love and creativity was meant to last until the expansion bill was withdrawn.) Nevertheless, the expansion passed and MAiD—a law that amounts to contemporary eugenics—is unchanged. The disability community’s fight to be recognized as fully human is ongoing. While Kennedy Healy and Marley Molkentin celebrate their bond, they also discuss the economic discrimination faced by disabled citizens of the United States. In the U.S., many Medicaid recipients must live in poverty in order to receive the services they depend on for survival. Maria Town celebrates her marriage to another disabled woman and also ties Medicaid’s logic to de facto marriage discrimination. As Town demonstrates, those who depend on benefits most must avoid marriage because marriage might lift them above the poverty line and exclude them from support services. In mainstream U.S. culture, the inability of some disabled people to form nuclear families represents both another form of social exclusion and another form of eugenics.
The collection’s third recurring theme is art and activism as forms of love. As we are reminded throughout the collection, those who witness or organize protests against unacceptable laws do so from a desire to cherish and protect their whole community. Those who celebrate their loved ones through art do so with love for their subjects and love for the audience. Sarah A. Young Bear-Brown of the Meskwaki Nation describes her art in “My Journey with Beadwork.” Her beadwork connects her to her culture and to her family; she is a fifth-generation beader who is teaching her daughter beadwork skills. Tee Franklin writes the queer disabled romance comics that they “desperately want[ed]” to read as a child into public circulation (208). Franklin’s work includes Bingo Love and Harley Quinn: The Eat. Bang! Kill. Tour. Naomi Ortiz writes about their love for their desert ecosystem and for the whole Earth as well as the whole disability community. Ortiz emphasizes the disabled community’s need for equity and consideration in all environmentalist efforts.
Disability Intimacy is both a welcome addition to the tradition of disability activism as love and a pleasure to read. All readers—even those familiar with the disability community—will likely be amazed at and moved by how many forms disability intimacy can take.
Title: Disability Intimacy: Essays on Love, Care, and Desire
Editor: Alice Wong
Publisher: Vintage Books (A Division of Penguin Random House LLC)
Date: 2024
Note:
- One of several definitions of “Crip” can be found here: https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-9780190221911/obo-9780190221911-0109.xml
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About the Reviewer
Kate Champlin (she/her) is a late-deafened adult and a graduate of Ball State University (Indiana). She currently works as a writing tutor and as a contract worker for BK International Education Consultancy, a company whose aim is to normalize the success of underserved students.