INTIMATE ASSEMBLAGES: DISABILITY, INTERCORPOREALITY, AND THE LABOUR OF ATTENDANT CARE
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
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.049 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.022 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".