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A review by brice_mo
Disability Intimacy: Essays on Love, Care, and Desire by Alice Wong
2.5
Thanks to NetGalley and Vintage Anchor for the ARC!
Depending on one’s perspective, Alice Wong’s Disability Intimacy is a mixed bag or a grab bag, a collection of essays without a clear organizing principle. Whether or not that matters will depend entirely on the reader.
I think well-edited collections should aways feel in conversation with themselves—each essay complements the other essays in some way. I cannot say that is the case for this book, where Wong’s editorial imperative feels unclear, resulting in pieces that always seem to talk past one another. This is a book with a bifurcated self.
Many of these essays are amazing, but just as many feel unfinished, unnecessary, or uncertain of their own inclusion.
A major way this problem plays out is ambiguity in its intended audience—is this book designed to offer solidarity to those who have been marginalized by disability, or is it meant to educate the uninformed?
Many of the essays in the former category fall flat, particularly those in the first half. They feel like workshop drafts, floundering for a clear purpose before their truncated endings. Some of them play dangerously close to the “actually, my disability is a superpower” trope while attempting to reframe pretty run-of-the-mill life experiences as exceptional. I’m sympathetic to how pain can harbor an almost obsessive interiority, but about half of the essays in this book are, bluntly put, solipsistic. They feel like a denial of disability rather than a desire to see the world truly recognize it. The result is a deeply muddled understanding of equity that I can’t help but think is counterproductive.
The book unintentionally highlights how we need better language for disability, terminology that creates space for multiple subjectivities without promoting insularity. In many of the personal essays, we see old words trying to form new discussions, and I think it simply does not work—feeling anxiety over being immunocompromised at an orgy is not the same as needing in-home care at all times. Is it even appropriate to call both "disability?" While reading, then, I wondered—how can we open definitional frameworks without resorting to shapelessness? I believe care, both in the sense of practical support and emotional intimacy, requires attention, and attention requires us to name accurately.
The best essays in Disability Intimacy wrestle thoughtfully with this tension, and many of the academic-skewing pieces—constrained to the latter half—are incredibly thought-provoking. Kennedy Healy and Marley Molkentin’s “Care During COVID” is excellent, as is Travis Chi Wing Lau’s piece on disability aesthetics. Ashley Volion and Akemi Nishida’s “Igniting Our Power by Reclaiming Intimacy” also thoughtfully picks at the power of language in how disability is constructed, along with all of the emergent nuances that go along with it. Elsewhere, we read about the forcible presence of the state in determining a relationship’s validity, and it is stomach-turning to behold. These essays are unified in their deep concern with our present reality while calling for a better one.
A few of the personal essays also exhibit the same strength, such as Marie E.S. Flores’s “My Journey to Motherhood” and Yomi Sachiko Wrong’s “Primary Attachment.” These pieces exhibit such gracious and thoughtful reflection about when competing subjectivities come into contact. Rather than resorting to indignation, these authors begin to offer new language towards a richer understanding of disability. They honor their own experiences, but they avoid insularity and instead envision a world that has room for them. I would be remiss to not acknowledge how wonderful some of the arts-centric essays are too, especially Sarah Young Bear-Brown’s piece on beadwork.
In the end, then, Disability Intimacy feels like two books with competing premises—one is defined by anger at the state of the world, and the other is characterized by ambition for a better world. With clearer editorial direction, these two themes may have coalesced, but as it stands, I wouldn’t recommend the book. If you’re interested, it’s probably better to just seek out individual essays so you can give them the attention they deserve.
Depending on one’s perspective, Alice Wong’s Disability Intimacy is a mixed bag or a grab bag, a collection of essays without a clear organizing principle. Whether or not that matters will depend entirely on the reader.
I think well-edited collections should aways feel in conversation with themselves—each essay complements the other essays in some way. I cannot say that is the case for this book, where Wong’s editorial imperative feels unclear, resulting in pieces that always seem to talk past one another. This is a book with a bifurcated self.
Many of these essays are amazing, but just as many feel unfinished, unnecessary, or uncertain of their own inclusion.
A major way this problem plays out is ambiguity in its intended audience—is this book designed to offer solidarity to those who have been marginalized by disability, or is it meant to educate the uninformed?
Many of the essays in the former category fall flat, particularly those in the first half. They feel like workshop drafts, floundering for a clear purpose before their truncated endings. Some of them play dangerously close to the “actually, my disability is a superpower” trope while attempting to reframe pretty run-of-the-mill life experiences as exceptional. I’m sympathetic to how pain can harbor an almost obsessive interiority, but about half of the essays in this book are, bluntly put, solipsistic. They feel like a denial of disability rather than a desire to see the world truly recognize it. The result is a deeply muddled understanding of equity that I can’t help but think is counterproductive.
The book unintentionally highlights how we need better language for disability, terminology that creates space for multiple subjectivities without promoting insularity. In many of the personal essays, we see old words trying to form new discussions, and I think it simply does not work—feeling anxiety over being immunocompromised at an orgy is not the same as needing in-home care at all times. Is it even appropriate to call both "disability?" While reading, then, I wondered—how can we open definitional frameworks without resorting to shapelessness? I believe care, both in the sense of practical support and emotional intimacy, requires attention, and attention requires us to name accurately.
The best essays in Disability Intimacy wrestle thoughtfully with this tension, and many of the academic-skewing pieces—constrained to the latter half—are incredibly thought-provoking. Kennedy Healy and Marley Molkentin’s “Care During COVID” is excellent, as is Travis Chi Wing Lau’s piece on disability aesthetics. Ashley Volion and Akemi Nishida’s “Igniting Our Power by Reclaiming Intimacy” also thoughtfully picks at the power of language in how disability is constructed, along with all of the emergent nuances that go along with it. Elsewhere, we read about the forcible presence of the state in determining a relationship’s validity, and it is stomach-turning to behold. These essays are unified in their deep concern with our present reality while calling for a better one.
A few of the personal essays also exhibit the same strength, such as Marie E.S. Flores’s “My Journey to Motherhood” and Yomi Sachiko Wrong’s “Primary Attachment.” These pieces exhibit such gracious and thoughtful reflection about when competing subjectivities come into contact. Rather than resorting to indignation, these authors begin to offer new language towards a richer understanding of disability. They honor their own experiences, but they avoid insularity and instead envision a world that has room for them. I would be remiss to not acknowledge how wonderful some of the arts-centric essays are too, especially Sarah Young Bear-Brown’s piece on beadwork.
In the end, then, Disability Intimacy feels like two books with competing premises—one is defined by anger at the state of the world, and the other is characterized by ambition for a better world. With clearer editorial direction, these two themes may have coalesced, but as it stands, I wouldn’t recommend the book. If you’re interested, it’s probably better to just seek out individual essays so you can give them the attention they deserve.