Disorganized Intimacy: Disability, Sexuality, and Social Life at a Disability Service Centre in Montreal, Quebec
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.039 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".