Crip Intimacy: Sockfriends, Sexuality, and ‘Cripped Things’

Abstract

Liam is a young man with Down Syndrome who I met during 16 months of ethnographic research in Montréal, Québec among intellectually disabled adults and their caregivers. Liam introduced me to his sockfriends, a group of socks that Liam understands as friends that his family understands as inanimate objects. Building on the conceptual foundations of queer kinship and intimacy, I analyze Liam’s relations with his sockfriends through the lens of what I call crip intimacy. I develop crip intimacy as an opportunity to think through the lived experience of intellectual disability, of being sexually regulated, and of being denied access to certain normative forms of intimacy. I draw on the work of queer and disabled scholars who analyze how conditions of sexual oppression, stigmatization, and ableism have given rise to particular kinds of kinship formations and intimacies between humans, non-humans, and others.

POINTS OF INTEREST

• Intellectually disabled people are often desexualized by their caregivers and support workers.

• Concerns about hypersexuality and vulnerability mean that the sexuality of intellectually disabled people is often framed as a problem that needs to be managed.

• This article discusses the way that a young intellectually disabled man navigates his sexuality under conditions of sexual surveillance and regulation with a set of socks he calls sockfriends.

• Through intimacy with non-human objects (‘sockfriends’). the young man asserts his sexual agency and refuses his own dehumanization, or what I theorize as ‘crip intimacy’.

• The young man’s family also become involved in crip intimacy with sockfriends in meaningful and transformative ways.

• This article is based on data collected through ethnographic fieldwork, including participant observation and interviews.

Keywords:

• Critical disability studies
• crip theory
• intimacy
• intellectual disability
• sexuality
• ethnography

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This research has been generously funded through a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship and a Wenner Gren Fieldwork Dissertation Grant.