Queerness, disability and the freedom to question
Hello,
This is a highly unusual - possibly unique! - second newsletter of the week. It turns out that writing The View From Down Here is one of the things reconnecting me to my sense of self at the moment, and your comments and messages about each issue are proving very sustaining. So here I am. I’m popping it behind the paywall as a thank you for the continued support.
I seek out my friend Rebekah Taussig’s words in the sea of the internet like I seek out my friend Rachel’s face in a crowded room: something to hold onto, anchor myself to, give myself a second to breathe, remind myself I am safe. And so it was this morning. I felt lost and confused and a little sad, and before I knew it I was reading this interview with Rebekah and feeling like maybe I was going to be alright.
When I read Rebekah’s words, I do a lot of internal nodding. Her experiences, though different to mine, feel intimately familiar, having so much to do, I think, not with the ways we do not fit the mainstream but the fact that we don’t. She captures so elegantly what it is to not-belong, and to find that difficult even as we learn to love ourselves and our lives and our not-belonging. Her words have a solid quality that, when I think about it, is probably simply another way of saying her words are true.
In the interview, Rebekah talks about how we need to expand our definitions, understandings and conceptions of romance, sexuality and relationships so that they are not mistaken, as they so often are, for being at odds with disability.
Then she says this:
But more than anything, I think the most expanding cultural shift for all of us in the arena of romance/sexuality – disabled folks very much included – would be the breaking apart of rigid boxes we’ve historically placed around gender and sexuality. Queerness, I think, offers an expansion for all of us. It invites us to swipe all assumptions off the table and reimagine what this could look like. To really ask each other – What do you want? What really feels good to you? In Sitting Pretty [her memoir], I talked about how all of our romantic/sexual relationships suffer when we lack imagination and cling to a rigid, narrow storyline of what sex is supposed to look like or the possible shapes of a romance. I think queerness could be one road to that kind of imagination. I guess I would just invite us to include disability in that conversation more directly and more often than we tend to now.
And a smile spread across my face. Because I think about this all the time. Not just when it comes to love and romance and sex but when it comes to life.
