INTIMATE ASSEMBLAGES: DISABILITY, INTERCORPOREALITY, AND THE LABOUR OF ATTENDANT CARE
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Attendant care provides an opening to consider the social and political implications of a relational ethics of intercorporeality and exposes the problematic foundation of independent living models that assert a normative encounter between autonomous and sovereign selves. In relation, both the disabled person and the attendant experience a leaking of their identities, a mingling of their sexualities, and multiple intimate slippages of selves as the attendant participates in the daily work of feeding, bathing, shopping, facilitating sex, and numerous other activities. The assemblages formed in such interactions have ethical implications for how we come to understand bodies, labour, and care. This article explores some aspects of the disabled- abled intimate care assemblage to discern its inventive and productive contributions to how we think through and with care. I argue that such an approach to the care assemblage complicates the usual ways in which the attendant is considered an employee. Drawing from the life experiences of disabled lesbian Connie Panzarino and through the example of attendant facilitated sex, I argue that independent living models, in their push for autonomy and independence, and in their formal approaches to employment and care, cannot lead to substantive emancipation for disabled people or others. Instead, I posit that it is through a relational ethics of intercorporeality that we can conceptualize care in a way that benefits disabled people and their attendants. Finally, I draw out the tensions involved in this assemblage to tend to the contradictions and quandaries that the desiring and labouring body faces when intimate care is put to work. Keywords: disability, assemblage, attendant care, labour, intercorporeality
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.039 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it