No abstract

Yes, we fuck! (2015) is a documentary that seeks to portray the sexuality of people with functional diversity that focuses on their empowerment and critiques ableism. Its filming has helped to generate alliances between Spanish activist groups, which have been named Alianzas Tullido-Transfeministas (Crip-Queer Alliances). Based on a research project that combined traditional and digital ethnography, this article reflects on how these crip-queer alliances have been constructed. First, we present a genealogy that contextualizes key events and explains their origins. Second, we analyse the construction process of the alliances, from queer to crip and vice versa, in order to reflect on the notions of intimacy that these alliances mobilize, while analysing their discourses and performances around the body, bonding, desire and sexuality. Finally, we explain the potential, as well as the difficulties and challenges, of these alliances.We conclude that they have followed their own situated process, where activists bring into play their bodies, emotions and intimacies and thus generate enormous potential for political action that questions ableism and heteropatriarchy

Methods to involve users in design have long been used to create relevant content and increase the accuracy of product development. Demographic trends have raised the issue of the needs and demands of older people, especially with regard to digitization. In contrast to the high number of publications discussing the importance of involving people in the design of their daily life, very few publications suggest how to do it. While participatory design is used with older people, there is no common understanding about which methods are used for what purposes. This paper presents a framework methodology that further advances the opportunity to involve older people in the design process and increase understanding of old people's subjective experience of getting their lives digitized and how to involve them in design. Given that digitalization, with its systemic complexity, requires an understanding of how technology is contextualized, the need to understand what it means to age in today's digital society is part of successful design. One objective is to go beyond stereotypes that often characterize generalizations of older people. We are using the concept of co-design, which is well established but not specifically adapted to older users. The goal is a matrix of tested co-design methods to be used by citizens, researchers, businesses or anyone who is interested in increasing the impact of old people on the design of new technologies.

Drawing on the notion of bodywork, we analyse the bodily aspects of personal assistance to expand the dialogue between medical sociology and disability studies. We aim to, firstly, overcome the lack of attention to the bodywork of personal assistant (PAs) in disability studies; secondly, explore the micropolitics of personal assistance and the role of independent living mandates in configuring this bodywork of PAs; and, thirdly, propose a more relational and material approach to the impairment/disability debate. This exploration is based on qualitative semi-structured interviews with 23 PAs conducted in Spain between 2018 and 2020. Our research reveals that PAs' bodywork implies performing their body as body-absence, such as when they enact body-tool and body-prosthesis figurations, but also as body-presence, for instance, as acting bodies and affected/affecting bodies in specific situations.Through their analysis, we foreground how PAs' bodywork conveys normative ways of enacting the body and how these body figurations are not only challenged and negotiated but define the actual practice of personal assistance. To conclude, we stress on the theoretical

This article combines the line of work that links disability and liminality with feminist dis/ability studies to analyse how the ‘disabled body‐subject’ is produced and subjectified during hospitalisation and post‐hospitalisation. This analysis is based on six bodily itineraries conducted with three men and three women with a spinal cord injury (five with tetraplegia and one with paraplegia) acquired during their adolescence. First, we interpret hospitalisation as a phase of ‘acute liminality’ in which the disabled body‐subject starts being produced as suspicious, expropriated and de/gendered. Secondly, we illustrate how discharge and the ‘return’ to the community entail the formation of several bodily assemblages that embody mal/adjustment. This leaves the subject in a state of ‘sustained liminality’ plagued with paradoxes and ambivalence. We argue that both liminalities lead disabled subjects to do an emotional work consisting of adjusting to situations of affective disablism while also opening up spaces of resistance regarding heterosexist and ableist mandates. We conclude by pointing out the potentialities of a two‐way dialogue between medical sociology and dis/ability studies.