Cripping and queering gender-based violence prevention: bridging disability justice, queer joy, and consent education

Abstract

Although frequently relegated to the periphery in conversations about gender-based violence prevention, the disabling impacts of traumatised subjectivity both affect survivors’ abilities to fully participate in sex and contribute to survivors being more than twice as likely to be sexually (re)victimised compared to peers without trauma histories. In this paper, we seek to crip and queer approaches to gender-based violence prevention, particularly consent education, by learning from 2SLGBTQ+ and disabled trauma survivors’ affective experiences of queer, crip sexual joy and the radically messy ways in which they establish their own care networks for deeply pleasurable sex through the principles of disability justice. Refusing pathologising understandings of survivors as those who need to be cured, we highlight traumatised subjectivity as emblematic of the ambiguity and ambivalence inherent in sex as well as the possibilities for caring, consensual sex that moves beyond the concept of consent employed in colonial, neoliberal capitalist societies’ binary (Yes/No) consent laws. Drawing on the work of crip and queer theorists such as Mia Mingus, Alison Kafer, Leah Piepzna-Samarasinha, and J. Logan Smilges, we reveal how disability justice principles, such as interdependence, collective access, and access intimacy, offer transformative understandings for anti-violence efforts.

Keywords:

• Gender-based violence
• 2SLGBTQ
• consent education
• disability justice
• queer joy

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Egale Canada for collaborating on the study represented in the paper, particularly Dr. Brittany Jakubiec, Amanda Wong, Kendall Forde, Shain Lambert, AQ Hui, Tamara Touma, and Jennifer Boyce. Thank you also to project assistants Ellis Greenberg, Elliot Fonarev, Noelle Kilbraeth, Molly Boyd, and Japnish Kaur for their assistance with the study. Thank you to Alan Santinele Martino for reviewing an early version of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Due to the sensitive nature of this research, study data are not publicly available.

Notes

1 ‘Bodyminds’ is a term which rejects the Cartesian separation of body and mind wherein instead of being separate entities they are recognised as part of a single integrated unit.

2 Grey areas can be understood as areas “of experience that [are] not easily categorised as consensual and wanted or as violent or criminal” (Wright 2021).

Additional information

Funding

The Queer Sexual Joy Project was funded by the Public Health Agency of Canada.