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Ableist Shame and Disruptive Bodies: Survivorship at the Intersection of Queer, Trans, and Disabled Existence

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Religion, Disability, and Interpersonal Violence

Abstract

Disabled people’s sexuality is fraught with tensions of desexualization and criminalization – at once presumed nonexistent while pathologized as terrifying and perverse. As sexuality is intricately tied to notions of gender identity (themselves dependent on the able-normative body), disabled people exist more often as objects in othering narratives than as subjects, let alone narrators, of their own. While people with all types of disabilities face astounding rates of sexual violence, those who are also queer, trans, or otherwise LGBTQIAP-identified inhabit bodies marginalized as deviant in multiple ways. Shared experiences of pathologization severely impact access to support, resources, mental health care, and healing spaces for queer and trans disabled survivors, whose experiences with gendered and sexual violence often transgress boundaries between home, school, institutions (and other carceral spaces), and the streets. This chapter will include discussion of exacerbating factors in trauma and erasure of queer and trans disabled survivors, such as the presumptions of incompetence and caregiver benevolence, the delegitimization of disabled people’s genders and sexualities, and the internal violence of ableist shame.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    I use the term “desexualization” deliberately, and I mention asexuality explicitly to avoid making the easy conflation of asexuality with enforced desexualization. Asexuality is a valid identity and experience, and some disabled people are asexual or on the asexual spectrum. Thus, enforced desexualization is the presumption that all disabled people must be inherently asexual because disabled people are incapable of experiencing or receiving sexual desire or exercising sexual autonomy. That enforced desexualization also strips disabled asexuals of self-determination when disabled movements routinely engage in disavowal of asexuality as a legitimate identity or experience that disabled people might claim alongside sexual identities or experiences.

  2. 2.

    Note of course that disabled people may also identify as genderless or agender – that is, as not having a gender. Somewhat analogously to asexuality, it is important to acknowledge that disabled people’s agency and self-determination must also extend to asexual and agender identities and experiences as much as to the full breadth and spectra of sexual and gender identities. Thus, degendering should not be conflated with the concept that to strip a person of gender is dehumanizing, since some people do not in fact identify with any gender. The dehumanizing aspect of both desexualization and degendering is that both processes strip their subjects of self-determination and the full range of possible identifications.

  3. 3.

    Pinkwashing, considered a specific manifestation of homonationalism (Puar, 2007), refers to a nation-state’s leveraging the appearance of “progressive” politics through superficial inclusion of or support for gay and lesbian people as a strategy to deflect or delegitimize criticism of both more deeply anti-queer/anti-trans policies and of imperialism and settler-colonialism. In particular, pinkwashing crafts a narrative of the imperialist/occupier state as a safer haven for gay and lesbian people who must be rescued from their communities/occupied nations of origin. The term is most often used to refer to Israel.

  4. 4.

    Many disability rights advocates support the development and implementation of supported decision-making models as an alternative to guardianship. Supported decision-making systems allow people with disabilities (whose disabilities affect their ability to make decisions completely independently) to form their own circle of supportive friends, relatives, and professionals to assist in making financial, medical, and other significant choices that they may need help to make.

  5. 5.

    Asasumasu (formerly known as Kassiane A. Sibley) first delivered a lecture on this topic entitled “DisAbused: Rethinking the Presumption of Caregiver Benevolence” at the University of Washington, Seattle on 28 February 2014, and later delivered the same lecture at Georgetown University on 23 September 2014. Asasumasu’s description of the lecture includes this description of the presumption of caregiver benevolence: “When our lives are framed as burdens on those around us, and our caregivers lauded as heroes simply for attending to our atypical access needs, our own lives and experiences are too easily erased, reduced to mere props in the stories of those who provide for us. This indignity fosters a climate in which our relationships with abusive caregivers are all too often reframed in terms of their own claims of hardship and suffering, rather than in terms of the suffering they have inflicted upon us. Society’s need to believe in the inherent nobility of those who serve disabled people in a support role must not take precedence over our own needs for personal safety and simple human dignity.”

  6. 6.

    A CDI is a Certified Deaf Interpreter. Since sign languages are as diverse and prolific as spoken languages and often even more fluid and rapidly changing, best practices in signing d/Deaf communication require the presence of a team of CDIs to accompany a team of hearing interpreters. This is especially important for insular – often multiply marginalized – d/Deaf communities where dialect sign or even very particular homesign is the only sign language used, as a hearing interpreter with even a very high level of proficiency in the “standardized” sign language of their region will be unable to communicate effectively or understand cultural cues. Another layer of audism (anti-deaf ableism ) exists in the requirements for separate certification of Deaf people as interpreters, which are distinct and more rigorous than those for hearing people to begin work as sign language interpreters.

  7. 7.

    One of the pioneers of current work oncollective care is Mia Mingus, who writes on access intimacy, collective wellness, pod mapping (as a transformative justice strategy), and disability justice. Mikael Lee (formerly Lee Lyubov) is another sick and disabled activist writing about community care and resource redistribution, as well as disposability and trash politics as part of disabled survivorship.

  8. 8.

    There are further grounds for critique on the conflation of race with socioeconomic status , which in itself is racist. Additionally, power dynamics inevitably enter any relationship between partners who have different experiences with privilege and marginalization but do not necessarily invalidate a relationship’s consensuality.

  9. 9.

    The reporter who wrote this horrifically ableist and un-nuanced article also wrote about an annual conference on supported typing/FC that took place at Syracuse University in the summer of 2014. I gave one of the keynote addresses at that conference. It was devastating to read the feature article .

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Public Interest Law Scholar, Northeastern University School of Law, Boston, MA, USA

    Lydia X. Z. Brown

  2. Massachusetts Developmental Disabilities Council, Quincy, MA, USA

    Lydia X. Z. Brown

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Correspondence to Lydia X. Z. Brown .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Bethel University, St. Paul, Minnesota, USA

    Andy J. Johnson

  2. Department of Psychology, Bethel University, St. Paul, Minnesota, USA

    J. Ruth Nelson

  3. Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

    Emily M. Lund

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Brown, L.X.Z. (2017). Ableist Shame and Disruptive Bodies: Survivorship at the Intersection of Queer, Trans, and Disabled Existence. In: Johnson, A., Nelson, J., Lund, E. (eds) Religion, Disability, and Interpersonal Violence. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56901-7_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56901-7_10

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