Disorganized Intimacy: Disability, Sexuality, and Social Life at a Disability Service Centre in Montreal, Quebec

In the wake of the deinstitutionalization movement in Canada, disability service organizations provide intellectually disabled people with independent living and social integration programs. Emerging from a deficit-model of disability, these programs are designed to mitigate the presumed social impairments of intellectually disabled people. Social skills training programs facilitate inclusion, purportedly addressing problems associated with social impairment: loneliness, isolation, and exclusion. This dissertation explores how disability service staff inculcate disabled clients into a normative organization of intimacy that delineates who one ought to be intimate with, and how and where intimacy should occur. I analyze staff efforts to organize disabled clients’ disorganized intimacy into a pre-given schema of social relations—along a continuum of intimacy—based on notions of proximity and distance. Through ethnographic fieldwork and involvement in day-to-day activities at a disability service centre in Montreal, Quebec, I examine how disorganized intimacy is framed as the source of exclusion, placing the onus of social integration on the client which, in turn, shapes aspects of disabled life including sexuality, consent processes, employment, and housing. I argue that disability services deploy a regime of intimacy that buttresses a range of hierarchies and categories, ultimately (re)producing the very segregation, exclusion, and eugenic logics it seeks to mitigate. The connection between how we organize intimacy and larger systems of power also means that, by doing intimacy differently, we can organize social life in alternative ways that value disabled life, knowledge, and desires. I identify the non-normative intimacies disabled people develop to navigate and survive ableist systems—what I call crip intimacies. In conversation with disability anthropologists and queercrip scholars, each chapter explores distinct relationships and their concomitant intimate intensities and (im)possibilities: research relationships, friendships, companionships, non-friends, and non-human relations. Friendship emerges as a particularly generative relational form, offering disabled people ways of relating that trouble and defy exclusionary intimate arrangements and expectations. This dissertation contributes to disability anthropology, critical disability studies, sexuality studies, and abolitionist research by bringing the experiences of intellectually disabled people to bear on intimacy and its role in shaping the social, including who is deemed includable and on what terms.

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