Disability Intimacy: Essays on Love, Care, and Desire, edited by Alice Wong

The idea that disabled people have every right not only to be loved but to love ourselves and to live lush, happy lives is unfortunately still a surprising one to many people, and it’s the perfect opener for Wong’s third book. Like her previous collection Disability Visibility and her Year of the Tiger: An Activist’s Memoir, this book defies categorization: it’s a mix of essays, poetry, photos, letters, conversations, and interviews that both welcome and challenge us, from caregiving to kink.

Some contributors offer the details of their disability (everything from ADHD, blindness, and cerebral palsy to endometriosis or losing a limb) and some don’t, or they unfold the information in oblique and gradual ways. This reflects an important truth: despite the pervasive belief that we are easy to recognize and categorize, disabled people live complex lives and we’ll tell our stories if and when we’re ready. We don’t owe it to anyone to look, act, or desire in a certain way.

Intimacy beyond love and sex

Sex and romance (spanning hookups, BDSM, masturbation, sex work, dating, marriage, and breakups) are key pieces of Disability Intimacy, and these honest, holistic, first-person views are long overdue in a world that tends to infantilize, desexualize, or fetishize disabled people. Just look at the popular platform of wife-and-husband collaborators Hannah and Shane Burcaw. Shane has spinal muscular atrophy and uses a wheelchair; they often get nasty responses from people who don’t believe that his nondisabled wife could possibly love him.

But Wong’s new collection goes beyond the most obvious connotations of “intimacy” to dive deep into many realms of connection, including pregnancy, parenting, foster care, friendship, scholarship, and activism. There are even two stories about animals: Emilie L. Gossiaux writes an ode to her guide dog, and Ada Hubrig shares what she learned from Rosasharon, a beloved cat who weathered lifelong illness alongside her.

“For the first time, I was completely comfortable with my disability around another. I knew that I didn’t have to act strong or tough or pretend,” she says. “Rosasharon and I could simply be with each other … I didn’t understand, until Rosasharon was part of my life, how necessary and important it is to be in community with others who experience disability, to share space with others who experience life in nonnormative ways.”

Covid, care, and solitude

In “Care During COVID: Photo Essay on Interdependence,” Kennedy Healy and Marley Molkentin collaborate on a frank, tender, and informative photo series documenting their caregiving relationship. Many Disability Intimacy pieces dwell deeply on the ongoing pandemic and its realities for disabled people, which is both sobering and refreshing in a world of contemporary media striving to ignore Covid-19.

Elliot Kukla reframes “laziness” in an essay about parenting, and “middle-aged, crip autistic nonbinary brown femme” Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha dives into the luxurious joys of solitude and autonomy, living alone as intimacy with the self. “I was crushing on that feral autistic wolf femme solitude like a perfect date,” they write. “I had not known how to say that I wanted, needed this.”

Prosthetics and archives

Ashley Shew’s “The Leg Chapter” details life with a prosthetic leg, and the space between her disabled identity and her choice to disclose it: “With my leg, I look ambulatory … people can forget for a time that I am disabled.” But then they might assume she can climb a long staircase. “Passing is its own burden: to avoid being fully seen, but also to avoid being discounted,” she decides.

Gracen Brilmyer examines “access intimacy in archives” by asking how we make archives, who is in them, and who can access them—and how this affects our view of society over time. It’s essential reading for any scholar. This collection also has plenty to satisfy art lovers, with reflections on dance, beadwork, collage, photography, and poetry through a disability lens.

Embracing crip wisdom

In recent years, disability activists have reclaimed the term “crip” in myriad forms, and it’s all over this collection. Some writers dwell on “crip time,” the idea of life on a flexible, undefined schedule that resists the capitalist business-day rush in favor of bodies or brains that have their own tempo—a concept I’m trying to bring more into my own personal and professional life.

Ashley Volion and Akemi Nishida reflect on “crip wisdom”: the unique know-how emerging from “everyday experiences of disabled, sick, Mad, fatigued, pained, Deaf, blind, and/or neurodivergent people.” Crip wisdom may sound like an oxymoron to an ableist society, Nishida continues, but “this disability genius-ness is totally our fuck-you to those who see our lives as trivial and valueless in a very eugenic way.”

Love from the inside out

Carrie Wade’s “Know Me Where It Hurts” considers sex, kink, and cerebral palsy, echoing the world behind Wong’s opening dedication. “Yes, sex with a disability is a tough sell, but not (just) for the reasons people assume. In my experience, the hardest part isn’t convincing somebody else you’re desirable—it’s convincing yourself that your body is worth pleasing.”

Disability Intimacy explores love from the inside out: not just the ways the world can and should meet disabled people, but the intrinsic value we all have, and the collective liberatory possibilities of our own pleasures and self-acceptance. That shouldn’t be a surprising message, but it’s a necessary one.