In Sickness and in Health. Love, Disability, and a Quest to Understand the Perils and Pleasures of Interabled Romance, by Ben Mattlin
Bibliographic record
Abstract
When it comes to sexuality in the disabled, dismissal is apt to turn into outright repression" states Nancy Mairs in her essay Sex and the Gimpy Girl (Mairs 2009: 8-9).Indeed, western society generally prefers to infantilize disabled people and think of them as asexual beings.Nothing is farther from the truth, shows the disability activist Ben Mattlin in his new book.The author, known for his biography Miracle Boy Grows Up (2012), addresses interabled relationships in all their complexity and normalcy, fighting the idea that interabled couples are either tragic or noble.Mattlin interviewed fourteen interabled couples, including himself and his wife Mary Lois, about the "perils and pleasures" of their relationships.In his interviews Mattlin included a range of couples, varying in disability, race, age, gender and sexual orientation, striving for what he calls "gender fairness" (46).The diversity scale of the book includes, for example, the Asian -African American couple Wanda and Kevin (33), Alisha and Jared, facing Jared's PTSD after his deployment during the Iraq War (63), and the aging lesbian couple Christina and Janet (186).However, Alisha and Jared are the only couple facing a non-physical disability and there is quite a limited scale of physical disabilities represented, with most participants being para-or quadriplegic due to disease or accident.With the exception of one Canadian couple, all the interviewed couples are from the United States.Some of the couples started off as interabled, while some faced together the shift to disability for one of the partners.The most harrowing example in the book are probably Rachelle and Chris, who received a lot of media attention after Rachelle became paralyzed due to an accident during her bachelorette party, just days before their planned wedding.That postponed their wedding for two years but did not break them up: their relationship "proved to be strong" (54).The last interview includes recently widowed Colleen who reflects upon her thirty-five years of marriage to the disability rights advocate and quadriplegic Max (214).While Mattlin might have striven for an intersectional approach, the lower class is strikingly missing.He does, however, address the insufficiency of state and federal aid for
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".