The Institutional Remains: Transinstitutionalization of Disability & Sexuality

Abstract

This research investigates access to sexuality for disabled people in Ontario. To understand sexual access, this research uses frameworks of disability justice and critical carceral studies to make explicit the pervasive the ongoing institutionalization of disabled people. Critically analyzing transinstitutionalization policy reveals surveillance, spatial regulation, and the criminalization of sex work as prohibitive barriers in disabled people's realization of their sexual desires. The City of Ottawa serves as a case study to interrogate the municipal regulation of sexuality through Minimum Separation Distance bylaws. The findings of this study illustrate the shared use of policy tools to invisibilize disabled people and sex workers through spatial regulation and segregation. These shared policy tools demonstrate the need for coalitional politics between sex workers and disabled people. The harms associated with transinstitutionalization and criminalization demand urgent action. Abolition responds to this urgency, demanding decriminalization, deinstitutionalization and decarceration.

Wooden spoons and “pulling the mom card”: A critical discourse-historical analysis of an interview with a social worker

“…Critical disability, race, and carceral scholars also highlight the role that social workers have played and continue to play in legitimizing state violence through carceral technologies like prisons, residential schools, and total institutions for disabled people under the guise of care, justice, or rehabilitation (Erevelles, 2014;Hutcheon & Lashewicz, 2020;Joseph, 2015;Linton, 2021). Piepzna-Samarasinha (2018) observes that "people's [current] fear of accessing care didn't come out of nowhere," pointing in particular to 'caring' institutions overlapping "with prison/carceral systems like residential schools, where Indigenous children were stolen, abused, and stripped of their language and culture, and where Black, brown, poor, criminalized, trans, queer, and sex working people were locked up for profit" (p. 39).…”

Data Representativeness in Accessibility Datasets: A Meta-Analysis

“…Aligning with recent research [110], we recommend an examination and contextualization of data representativeness grounded in political, economic, and socio-cultural lenses, integrating insights from scholars in fields such as critical disability studies [28], trans/gender studies [157], and histories of social movements [136] into an analysis of power relations. As an example, one could draw from recent work by disability studies scholars examining the context the data is collected in (i.e., for AI systems vs for visibility and activism) and how representation impacts are also context-dependent [93].…”