Walking to the train station with Amal: dis/ability and in/visibility

Abstract

This article reflects on an encounter following a life-history interview with a participant, Amal, who was part of my doctoral research. The article documents and theorises a relatively ordinary and mundane event – walking. Her disabled body and my queer body were stared at intensely as we walked, and this encounter forced me to reflect on the ethics and politics of dis/ability and in/visibility. I take Garland-Thomson’s point that being stared at ‘demands a response’, and in this article I make that response and theorise the dynamic struggle that occurred between Amal, myself, and those who stared at us. Interrogating the concepts of forced intimacy, matter out of place, and microaggressions, I reimagine them to resist the normative discourses that have pathologised Amal and disabled people more broadly. Utilising crip and queer theory, I put forth a performative politics that seeks to crip/queer the ableist/heteronormative circumstances that abjected our existence.

Keywords:

• Disability
• staring
• forced intimacy
• matter out of place
• microaggression
• crip/queer theory

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Alex Cockain (2018), a man whom he has never met, for his article that gave the confidence and foundation to materialise the ideas contained within this article. The author also thanks Nicole Asquith for their feedback on an earlier version of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.