No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
Cripping and queering gender-based violence prevention: bridging disability justice, queer joy, and consent education
Culture, Health & Sexuality
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.
... Participants also discussed how they shared or co-created sexual joy with partners through experimentation and fantasy, a process that was facilitated through an openness to creativity due to script breaking. Participants approached sex not as a static production, but as an interdependent creative process of mutual exploration grounded in intersubjective recognition of needs and boundaries (also see Wright & Manuel, 2024). The creativity inherent to sex imbued with queer and trans joy was reflected in cellphilming workshop participant, Jodie's (27, mixed-race, queer, disabled, non-binary) film (Figure 1) which featured a series of sex toys they and their girlfriend use as well as a series of words Jodie associated with queer sexual joy: innovative, full of consent, sexy, fun, wonderful, special, and "can be full of pussy." ...
... For Frankie and other participants, expressing care for self by identifying and centering their boundaries was an essential part of creating the conditions of safety necessary for queer and trans sexual joy. Moreover, as 2SLGBTQþ youth are subjected to sexual violence at disproportionately high rates compared to their cis heterosexual peers (Wright, Zidenberg, et al., 2023), for Frankie and other survivors in the study, navigating consent in nuanced ways with queer partners was liberating, deeply pleasurable, and this practice rejected the reductive, transactional approach to consent often taught in sexuality education (Wright, 2022;Wright & Manuel, 2024). ...
... We have evidenced that queer and trans sexual joy is not simply 2SLGBTQþ sex, it is a particular kind of affective engagement that creates expansiveness, where constraints from dominant sexual scripts loosen in ways that feel liberating and deeply pleasurable. Looking forward, more research is needed to examine the lessons that forms of joy that intersect with queer and trans joy, such as Black Joy (Mitchell, 2022), Indigiqueer joy (Ashcroft, 2022), and crip joy (Wright & Manuel, 2024), offer for sexual ethics and creating sexual cultures that are more just and mutually pleasurable. ...
This article contends with queer joy as an epistemology to highlight an affective experience that grounds a basis for revising dominant approaches to sexual ethics. Drawing on findings from a mixed‐methods study with 100 2SLGBTQ+ young adults from Canada and the US, we argue that queer and trans people mobilize queer sexual joy as an epistemology of script breaking that led participants to explore freedom and play, enjoy novel forms of care and communality, and to challenge oppression. We found that 2SLGBTQ+ young adults are undermining dominant sexual cultures which perpetuate gender‐based violence through cisheteronormative logics of objectification and dominance. Rather than simply producing misery, normative sex and gender regimes produced a disorientation among 2SLGBTQ+ young adults which was fruitful for breaking sexual scripts and developing approaches to sex and relationships grounded in greater authenticity, creativity, reciprocity, play, and joy. We propose that by taking queer joy as a way of knowing, we may learn how queer and trans people negotiate the performativity of gender and sex, their own bodily knowledge, and the epistemic injustices that have precluded this knowledge from being valued. Pushing against the “joy deficit” in sociology that constrains the field to the study of the misery that minority communities face, this paper not only demonstrates what sociologists might learn from the texture of queer and trans lives, but also how these lessons can help to undermine cisheteronormativity as a root cause of gender‐based violence.
... When we call on queer joy, we point towards the many identities and sexualities that exist within and beyond the 2SLGBTQIA + acronym. Queer joy must be considered in relationship to other forms of joy it intersects with and is constituted by, such as trans joy (Westbrook and Shuster, 2023), Indigiqueer joy (Ashcroft, 2022), Black (queer) joy (Persaud and Crawley, 2022), crip joy Wright and Manuel, 2024), and fat joy (Evans et al., 2021). This intersectional approach is reflected in the articles featured in the special issue, which explore queer joy from theoretical and methodological approaches that attempt to counter racism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, patriarchy, classism, and sexism in an effort to work toward social change. ...
Our introduction to the special issue “Mobilising Queer Joy” reflects an urgent need for queer joy studies amidst a sociopolitical climate that feels increasingly ruinous. We reject the ‘joy deficit’ in sociological research that fixates on homogenous, misery-filled visions of 2SLGBTQIA+ existence, and which is severed from the profound beauty of queer love, queer and trans joy, gender euphoria, and the strength and depth of 2SLGBTQIA+ community care and chosen families. In addition to introducing the six articles in the special issue from authors in Canada, the Philippines, Australia, and the US, we aim to establish queer joy studies by articulating the affective power of queer joy for collective resistance and social transformation. Queer joy is more than a kitschy slogan on a tote bag or splashed on the side of a big bank’s Pride float; it is a collective experience that allows us to feel more alive and connected to our personal capacities and power. The queer joy we are interested in is dangerous to empire and colonial powers. It does not deny the relationship with ambivalence, rage, and grief, and instead mobilises these affects to confront injustices in our existing social order. Some of the questions we ask include: How does queer joy act as world-making and dream mapping of new, more sustainable futures? How might we further theorize and mobilise queer joy as a disruption to settler colonial, carceral logics? How might the transformative power of queer joy be amplified to fragment and challenge the rise of fascism and populism that seeks to exterminate it?
... Wyatt noted that, if someone expresses that they have been harmed, one has to think 'How can I not do that in the future? Where does that come from?' Kit (they/them), a 29-year-old white, queer, non-binary, disabled, participant who was living in poverty, emphasized that people should, but rarely do, reflect by thinking: 'this person said I harmed them, what can I do to take accountability, and why did this person not feel safe in the moment to speak up?' Moving into sexual cultures that are more just, caring, interdependence-focused, and deeply mutually pleasurable requires accountability processes for self and other, which is something that transformative and disability justice approaches provide some direction on (brown, 2019; Mingus, 2019;Wright & Manuel, 2024). ...
This article contends with queer joy as an epistemology to highlight an affective experience that grounds a basis for revising dominant approaches to sexual ethics. Drawing on findings from a mixed‐methods study with 100 2SLGBTQ+ young adults from Canada and the US, we argue that queer and trans people mobilize queer sexual joy as an epistemology of script breaking that led participants to explore freedom and play, enjoy novel forms of care and communality, and to challenge oppression. We found that 2SLGBTQ+ young adults are undermining dominant sexual cultures which perpetuate gender‐based violence through cisheteronormative logics of objectification and dominance. Rather than simply producing misery, normative sex and gender regimes produced a disorientation among 2SLGBTQ+ young adults which was fruitful for breaking sexual scripts and developing approaches to sex and relationships grounded in greater authenticity, creativity, reciprocity, play, and joy. We propose that by taking queer joy as a way of knowing, we may learn how queer and trans people negotiate the performativity of gender and sex, their own bodily knowledge, and the epistemic injustices that have precluded this knowledge from being valued. Pushing against the “joy deficit” in sociology that constrains the field to the study of the misery that minority communities face, this paper not only demonstrates what sociologists might learn from the texture of queer and trans lives, but also how these lessons can help to undermine cisheteronormativity as a root cause of gender‐based violence.
2SLGBTQI youth are at disproportionately high risk of experiencing gender-based violence compared to their cis-heterosexual peers, although there is a gap in research explaining why as well as what this violence looks like. Part of the explanation relates to ongoing homophobia and transphobia; however, more research is needed to understand 2SLGBTQI youths’ feelings of safety within their communities, their experiences of violence with partners, and their help-seeking behaviours. Given the limited Canadian research, the Speak Out project was undertaken. Te Speak Out project is a multi-phase project with Phase 1 encompassing a survey of youth across Canada about their experiences of gender-based violence. From across Canada, 292 youths were recruited and asked to complete a survey on gender-based violence. Te survey covered four domains related to violence (physical violence, emotional abuse/control, sexual violence, virtual violence) participants experienced, experiences with help-seeking, and connections to the 2SLGBTQI community. Most youths had connections to the broader 2SLGBTQI community and were open about their identities, but many reported being discriminated against based on their gender expression (50%) and sexual orientation (43%). Of the participants who answered questions related to physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, very few reported any incidents. More youths reported virtual violence via text messages (34%), making them afraid to ignore phone calls or other contact (18%), and surveillance of their social media (18%). These results contribute valuable knowledge on the experiences of Canadian 2SLGBTQI youths and have important implications for both education and frontline service provision.
This paper theorises the ways in which non-binary gender is rendered invisible through binary Yes/No sexual consent educa- tion. Judith Butler’s framework of gender intelligibility is drawn upon to consider the absenting of non-binary youth from consent education. We suggest that the undoing of the hegemonic colo- nial gender binary also be a project of consent education. Consent education is often taught through a highly gendered lens underscored by the ‘miscommunication hypothesis,’ which posits normative binary gender roles as the underlying cause of sexual violence and fails to account for how non-binary youth experience and navigate consent. Furthermore, we examine how binary Yes/No consent education negates non-binary gender by rejecting the grey area of consent. The dismissal of grey area experiences is problematic for non-binary youth as ambiguity around consent may be more prevalent amongst non-binary people due to increased experiences of trauma and the common experience of gender dysphoria. Despite this invisiblisation, non- binary people have formulated their own modes for navigating sexual pleasure and consent. We call for more research into how non-binary youth are invisibilised by binary consent education as well as how these youth are challenging normative consent and reimagining sexual cultures that centre interdependence, mutual pleasure, and care.
Sexual consent education has emerged in recent years as the most popular method of preventing gender-based violence. Yet, the concept of consent used in much contemporary programming problematically oversimplifies sexual exploration and the power dynamics it is imbued with by asserting that consent is as simple as “Yes” or “No.” The messiness of sexual negotiation or the ‘grey areas’ of consent that youth may experience are left unaddressed. By examining the experiences of youth trauma survivors through a trauma-informed lens, the limits to binary consent education become clear. I draw on empirical data from nine open-ended interviews with Canadian youth trauma survivors to demonstrate how a trauma-informed lens may be implemented in consent education. I argue that educators should include understandings of consent which falls outside the Yes/No binary in order to adequately address youth survivors’ vulnerability to sexual (re)victimization. I examine how three of the psychosocial impacts of trauma, dissociation, hypersexuality, and struggles with acquiescence, refuse the binaristic model of consent and should be considered for trauma-informed consent education. While education alone cannot end rape culture, addressing the grey area of consent in consent education may help reduce preventable harm for survivors, as well as youth more broadly.
This study examined how gender shapes sexual interactions and pleasure outcomes. We highlight varying expectations people have in regard to sex by combining questions about orgasm frequency and sexual pleasure. Our analysis was driven from a sample of 907 survey responses from cis women, cis men, trans women, trans men, non-binary, and intersex millennial respondents, 324 of which had gender-diverse sexual histories. The findings built upon previous literature about the orgasm gap by including those with underrepresented gender identities and expanding our conceptualization of gender’s role in the gap beyond gender identity. Qualitative results indicated that individuals change their behavior based on their partner’s gender and follow strong gendered scripts. Participants also relied upon heteronormative scripts and cis normative roles to set their interactions for the sexual encounter. Our findings support previous research on how gender identity impacts pleasure outcomes and has implications for how we might make gender progress in the arena of sexuality.
Joy is a crucial element of people’s everyday lives that has been understudied by sociologists. This is particularly true for scholarship about transgender people. To address what we term a joy deficit in sociology, we analyze 40 in-depth interviews with trans people in which they were asked what they find joyful about being trans. Their responses demonstrate the methodological and theoretical importance of asking about joy. Four main themes emerged from the interviews. First, interviewees easily answered the question about joy. Second, contrary to common assumptions, we found that transgender people expressed joy in being members of a marginalized group and said that they preferred being transgender. Third, embracing a marginalized identity caused the quality of their lives to improve, increasing self-confidence, body positivity, and sense of peace. Finally, being from a marginalized group facilitated meaningful connections with other people. Our findings demonstrate a vital need to address the joy deficit that exists in the sociological scholarship on transgender people specifically, and marginalized groups more generally. Bridging the sociology of knowledge and narratives, we show how accentuating joy offers nuance to understandings of the lived experiences of marginalized people that has been absent from much of sociological scholarship.
Values such as ‘access’ and ‘inclusion’ are unquestioned in the contemporary educational landscape. But many methods of addressing these issues — installing signs, ramps, and accessible washrooms — frame disability only as a problem to be ‘fixed.’ The Question of Access investigates the social meanings of access in contemporary university life from the perspective of Cultural Disability Studies. Through narratives of struggle and analyses of policy and everyday practices, Tanya Titchkosky shows how interpretations of access reproduce conceptions of who belongs, where and when. Titchkosky examines how the bureaucratization of access issues has affected understandings of our lives together in social space. Representing ‘access’ as a beginning point for how disability can be rethought, rather than as a mere synonym for justice, The Question of Access allows readers to critically question their own implicit conceptions of disability, non-disability, and access.
This special issue engages with the relationship between feminist theory and ‘theaffective turn’. Through their analyses of a range of affective states, spheresand sites, the authors in this volume pose critical questions regarding feministtheoretical engagements with affect, emotion and feeling.
1
They ask whether it isnecessarily a positive move to put affect theory and feminist theory together,or whether there are inherent risks, for example of depoliticisation, or of anover-privileging of the individual; whether feminist theorists have made, or canmake, distinctive contributions to conceptualising affect; and what particularinsights feminist theory can bring to bear. In different ways, the authors featuredhere consider how we can understand the complex implications of the turn to affectin and for feminist theory, and how we might examine its potentialities for theor-etical, political and social transformation.
The role of iteration in qualitative data analysis, not as a repetitive mechanical task but as a reflexive process, is key to sparking insight and developing meaning. In this paper the authors presents a simple framework for qualitative data analysis comprising three iterative questions. The authors developed it to analyze qualitative data and to engage with the process of continuous meaning-making and progressive focusing inherent to analysis processes. They briefly present the framework and locate it within a more general discussion on analytic reflexivity. They then highlight its usefulness, particularly for newer researchers, by showing practical applications of the framework in two very different studies.
This collection of essays seeks to expand the parameters of the debate on pornography. In an effort to move away from the divisive frameworks of which side are you on? and who counts as women worthy to be listened to? in feminist debates on pornography, this volume seeks to understand what pornography means to those who consume it, fight against it, work within it, and to those engaged in changing its meaning. By opening up a space for divergent points of view to address the complexity of sexual material, this volume seeks to forge solidarity amongst a diverse array of constituencies, including academics, activists, and sex workers from diverse socio-political contexts. Through seeking to address the relationship between imperialism, the exotic, and the pornographic, the collection moves away from Eurocentric perspectives on pornography, by including the perspectives of women involved in struggles for national liberation in the South. This volume explores a wide range of issues, such as, how the meaning of pornography is shaped by changing historical and political realities; the role law should play, if any, in the sex industry; whether union organizing can change the working conditions in the sex industry; kinds of representational politics available for redefining pornography; and how sexually explicity literature, videos, art, and music can serve the purpose of sexual freedom. Contributors to the volume include Diana Russell, Catharine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin, Wendy Brown, Becki Ross, Mallek Alloula, M. Jacqui Alexander, Victoria Ortiz, bell hooks, Rey Chow, Judith Butler, Candida Royalle, Zoraida Ramirez Rodriguez, amongst others.
Through the use performative writing and autoethnography, this piece reflects on the current state of collective crises and social science to reinvigorate our approaches to building more equitable futures. More specifically, I push back on the politics of violent visibility for marginalized subjects both inside and outside the academy. I argue that texts and images of minoritarian trauma and violence reify the structures of power that created those material conditions to begin with. Utilizing the process of queer of color worldmaking, I suggest that centering minoritarian joy becomes a tool for speaking back toward our current climate of collective crisis. The piece concludes displaying the potential of experiencing and writing through collective joy.
The increasing prevalence of campus sexual assault begs the question of whether consent campaigns, and interventions that preceded them, may be effectively paying lip service to this issue rather that creating meaningful reform. In this paper, we focus on poster campaigns that promote consent as a solution to campus sexual assault. We begin by reviewing the various definitions and critiques of consent. Our sample of 194 posters was obtained through Google and Pinterest searches on various search terms (e.g. “university consent sexual.”) Using Willig’s (2013) 6 Stages of Discourse Analysis that leads the researcher through discursive constructions, positioning, discourses, subjectivities, action orientations, and practices, we discuss themes and discourses around the idea that consent is simple; that women are to be strong sexual agents; that sex requires a conversation; and that onlookers must be responsible citizens. The first three of these discourses reveal a neoliberal perspective of individual choice that can lead to self-blame, letting universities off the hook. Our analysis invokes Foucault’s thoughts on prisons which, in an endless state of reforming, maintain the status quo. We argue that consent is a minimal ethical requirement and mutuality may be a better guide to having ethical sex.
The problem of sexual assault has received increasing public attention over the last few years, with an increasing focus on the concept of sexual consent to solve the problem. Education efforts focus on teaching people what consent is and how to explicitly communicate about sex, constructing consent as a knowledge problem. Using the stories of queer adults, this study calls for the development of an epistemology of sexual consent. I argue that the current research and scholarship fail to recognise existing knowledge about sexual consent, relegating sexual consent to an epistemology of ignorance. Queer participants in this study demonstrated sophisticated knowledge of sexual consent through their talk on the role of verbal consent cues and articulating how they “tune in” to their partners during sex. Within their talk, verbal consent was sometimes viewed as essential to consent, while at times was not necessary, and at other times was not enough to understand a partner's sexual consent. Importantly, they described deep knowledge about partners’ comfort, discomfort or hesitation through “tuning in”. Developing an epistemology of sexual consent requires recognising and valuing what participants tell us about what they know about their partners’ willingness to engage in sex.
In this paper, I critically reflect on my efforts to and experiences of integrating disability justice and crip theory into my intersectional, queer, feminist pedagogy. I begin by grounding my pedagogical practice in my experiences as an anti-violence advocate / activist in order to argue that disability theory and justice have the potential to not only expand anti-violence education, but also to transform it through careful attention to access, care, and interdependence. In this article, access refers to the possibilities of being fully present and supported within a given learning space; care describes the process of creating access through actions that make presence possible; and interdependence recognizes that access and care must co-exist because people need each other. I then identify parallels between anti-violence work and theories and movements against ableism because I have found this intersection to be pedagogically generative. Next, I describe what disability theory and justice, access, and crip politics (McRuer, 2006; Price, 2015) look like within the context of anti-violence education. In the second section of this paper, I write about how disability theory and justice brought to bear on anti-violence education can help to promote radical imagination and hope as well as deeper understandings of foundational concepts like consent. I also critically examine how anti-violence education can expand the possibilities of disability pedagogy through meaningful engagements with intersectional feminist theory and praxis. My purpose in developing these claims is to demonstrate the ongoing importance of bridging disability theory and justice with intersectional feminist practices of education.
Sometimes sex is really fucking hard. Pun intended. This essay explores the role of trauma in sex, arguing that experiences of trauma can reconstitute the erotic in ways that are incompatible with prevailing discourses on queerness, consent, and sexual violence. "Trauma sex" is a way of capturing the queer and crip flavors of this erotic reconstitution by demonstrating how many of us experience sex, sexuality, and desire in ways that go unremarked on by disability and queer studies, independently. Grounded in "conscientious intimacy," trauma sex brings together disability and queer studies to call for an opening up of desire, a radical expansion of what we acknowledge as sex, sexual, and sexy, by attending to the troubling absence of disability from queer theory, of trauma from disability studies, and of the inadequate attention to race and processes of racialization in both fields. Sex and trauma are complicated, this essay suggests, so our conversations about them should be too.
The Cambridge Companion to Queer Studies - edited by Siobhan B. Somerville June 2020
Sexual consent is a crucial component of any healthy sexual relationship. The current study aimed to examine the extent to which women who have previously experienced sexual trauma but are now in a healthy relationship understand and navigate consent and feel empowered to voice their needs and wants in their relationship. These women are uniquely positioned to provide insights into sexual consent given that they have lived through the result of nonconsensual sex and can reflect upon what makes consent particularly important to them in their relationships post-sexual trauma. Forty-one women completed an in-depth semi-structured phone interview and their responses were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. The analytic process resulted in the identification of nine themes in total; three related to consent in their current relationship and six related to the communication of needs and wants. Participants were divided between consent within their relationship as (1) explicit, (2) non-explicit, and (3) evolving. In their experience of feeling empowered to voice their needs and wants, participants indicated this to be (1) evolving, (2) requiring vulnerability and safety, (3) a non-negotiable requirement, (4) inherently interpersonal, (5) something that takes work, and (6) involving echoes of shame and trauma. These results highlight the complicated nature of negotiating consent and finding sexual agency. They also provide unique insight into consent and agency in a sample of women who have experienced nonconsensual sex and have shown resilience in their pursuit of a healthy relationship post-sexual trauma.
This novel paper critically addresses a currently popular sex education resource which compares sexual consent to tea drinking. Drawing from a study which considered the meaning of consent through focus groups and interviews with young people and professionals, we argue that the central ‘risk avoidance’ message of such resources individualises the potential risks of non‐consensual sex and ignores the gendered social structures which shape interpersonal relationships. We suggest that simplifying and extrapolating sexual consent from broader cultural understandings is problematic. Conversations with young people are important, but they need to address the complexity of sexual consent, coercion and gendered sexual norms.
The article argues for a crip feminist trauma studies framework by developing its methodologies theoretically and in the practice of interpreting the Netflix series Jessica Jones. Synthesizing recent work in crip feminism and mad feminism, and locating “trauma as possibility” through Clementine Morrigan’s analysis, the article establishes the theoretical framework of crip feminist trauma studies. It shows that Jessica Jones inhabits the politics of trauma as possibility and of mad feminism (Mollow), and shows that and how “we need each other” (Mingus). The series indicates the possibility trauma holds, or what is possible when we know we need each other and we act like we need each other. Indicating the (popular) cultural value of Jessica Jones as a series, the article shows the necessity of a crip feminist trauma studies methodology as part of a larger body of disability studies work, as well as its contributions to feminist and gender studies. Thus the article engages two emerging interdisciplinary fields (feminist crip and crip trauma studies frameworks) in order to argue for crip feminist trauma studies.
Review of The Question of Access: Disability, Space, Meaning by Tanya Titchkosky
The article begins with a discussion of how debates over “trigger warnings” require a re-evaluation of the place of trauma in disability studies, arguing that our failure to engage the traumatic effects of disability constricts our work. Next, the article examines three scenes of disability disclosure that are entangled with questions of tragedy and trauma. These were settings that presumed one kind of disclosure but compelled another and, as a result, competing notions of safety and accessibility bumped up against one another. The first scene, a BDSM workshop, raises questions about which traumas are recognizable in different settings, while the second, the Society for Disability Studies annual conference, challenges assumptions about the very possibility of “safe” spaces. The article moves to a third scene, the disability studies classroom, in order to complicate the intertwinings of disability disclosure, trauma, and their effects. Throughout, there is an argument for the necessity of disability theori...
Over the last thirty years, the field of disability studies has emerged from the political activism of disabled people. In this challenging review of the field, leading disability academic and activist Tom Shakespeare argues that the social model theory has reached a dead end. Drawing on a critical realist perspective, Shakespeare promotes a pluralist, engaged and nuanced approach to disability. Key topics discussed include: dichotomies - the dangerous polarizations of medical model versus social model, impairment versus disability and disabled people versus non-disabled people, identity - the drawbacks of the disability movement's emphasis on identity politics, bioethics in disability - choices at the beginning and end of life and in the field of genetic and stem cell therapies, care and social relationships - questions of intimacy and friendship. This stimulating and accessible book challenges orthodoxies in British disability studies, promoting a new conceptualization of disability and fresh research agenda. It is an invaluable resource for researchers and students in disability studies and sociology, as well as professionals, policy makers and activists.
Grounded theory and theoretical coding Grounded theory (GT) is a research approach in which data collection and analysis take place simultaneously. Each part informs the other, in order to construct theories of the phenomenon under study. GT provides rigorous yet flexible guidelines that begin with openly exploring and analysing inductive data and leads to developing a theory grounded in data. Induction starts with ‘study of a range of individual cases and extrapolates patterns from them to form a conceptual category’ (Charmaz, 2006: 188). Nevertheless, instead of pure induction, the underlying logic of GT actually moves between induction and abduction. Abduction means selecting or constructing a hypothesis that explains a particular empirical case or set of data better than any other candidate hypotheses, as a provisional hypothesis and a worthy candidate for further investigation. GT was originally developed by sociologists Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss (1967), and has since then been ...
p>In this essay, we explore possible affinities between disability studies and trauma studies. We suggest that a fruitful engagement between these fields should start with the meanings of trauma and disability in their embodiment. We offer theoretical provocations alongside a comparative cultural analysis of traumatic brain injury and obstetric fistula. Ironically, while many disability studies scholars have worked to dislodge definitions of "abnormal" from the body, a conceptual focus on stigma still keeps the disabled body partially in view. Yet wounds, impairment, and pain are erased, and in many framings, the object of analysis is an individual being, whose now-disabled body is socially constructed, and whose agency is posited as being in struggle and resistance against the normative culture. We suggest that the body itself provides a link between disability studies and critical trauma studies, arguing both for the significance of representations as well a materialist understanding of breach, for a notion of the organic, fleshy body as it is damaged, sometimes profoundly, in its operations of life.
Keywords: Disability studies; Trauma studies; Traumatic Brain Injury; Obstetric Fistula; Theory</p
For those who have been told not to be a ‘killjoy
- C A Riley
Riley, C. A. (@BlackLiturgies). "For those who have been told not to be a 'killjoy'. " Instagram, December
24, 2023. https://www.instagram.com/p/C1PhkDNOIQr/?igsh=MTl5azZwdGFkcDZ4ZQ==.
Transforming Cultures of (Un)Desirability: Creating Cultures of Resistance
- L Erickson
- Erickson L.
Erickson, L. 2016. "Transforming Cultures of (Un)Desirability: Creating Cultures of Resistance."
Graduate Journal of Social Science 12 (1): 11-22.
Cripping the Fuck Out:’ A Queer Crip Mad Manifesta Against the Medical Industrial Complex
- L Johnk
- S Khan
- Johnk L.
Johnk, L., and S. Khan. 2019. "Cripping the Fuck Out:' A Queer Crip Mad Manifesta Against the
Medical Industrial Complex." Feral Feminisms 9: 26-38.
Crip Kinship: The Disability Justice and Art Activism of Sins Invalid
- S Kafai
- Kafai S.
Kafai, S. 2021. Crip Kinship: The Disability Justice and Art Activism of Sins Invalid. Vancouver:
Arsenal Pulp Press.
The ‘Grey Area’ of Consent: Understanding the Psychosocial Impacts of Trauma on Sexual Consent
- J Wright
Wright, J. 2021. "The 'Grey Area' of Consent: Understanding the Psychosocial Impacts of Trauma
on Sexual Consent." PhD diss., University of Toronto. https://hdl.handle.net/1807/125873.
Disabling Consent or Reconstructing Sexual Autonomy
- Fischel J.
Fischel, J., and H. O'Connell. 2015. "Disabling Consent or Reconstructing Sexual Autonomy."
Columbia Journal of Gender and Law 30 (2): 428-528.
Learning From Queer and Trans Sexual Joy: Cultivating Just Pleasurable and Affirming Sexual Cultures.” The Queer Sexual Joy Project. Egale Canada. 1-140
- J E Wright
- E Fonarev
- Greenberg
Access Intimacy: The Missing Link
- M Mingus
Mingus, M. 2011. "Access Intimacy: The Missing Link." https://leavingevidence.wordpress.
com/2011/05/05/access-intimacy-the-missing-link/.
Sexual Consent: Some Thoughts on Psychoanalysis and Law
- J Butler
Butler, J. 2011. "Sexual Consent: Some Thoughts on Psychoanalysis and Law." Columbia Journal
of Gender and Law 21 (2): 405-429. https://doi.org/10.7916/cjgl.v21i2.2632.
- P H Collins
- S Bilge
Collins, P. H., & Bilge, S. (2020). Intersectionality. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.
Power and Desire: The Embodiment of Female Sexuality
- J Holland
- C Ramazanoglu
- S Sharpe
- R Thomson
Holland, J., C. Ramazanoglu, S. Sharpe, and R. Thomson. 1994. "Power and Desire: The Embodiment
of Female Sexuality." Feminist Review 46 (1): 21-38. https://doi.org/10.2307/1395415.
Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice
- L Piepzna-Samarasinha
Piepzna-Samarasinha, L. 2018. Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp
Press. https://doi.org/10.1177/15413446211011267.
Disability, Sex Radicalism, and Political Agency
- A Wilkerson
Wilkerson, A. 2002. "Disability, Sex Radicalism, and Political Agency." NWSA Journal 14 (3): 33-57.
https://doi.org/10.2979/NWS.2002.14.3.33.
Learning From Queer and Trans Sexual Joy: Cultivating Just, Pleasurable, and Affirming Sexual Cultures
- J Wright
- E Fonarev
- E Greenberg
Wright, J., E. Fonarev, and E. Greenberg. 2023. "Learning From Queer and Trans Sexual Joy:
Cultivating Just, Pleasurable, and Affirming Sexual Cultures." The Queer Sexual Joy Project.
Egale Canada. 1-140. https://egale.ca/awareness/qsj/#Report