As you can probably tell if you’ve been reading the blog, I like to focus on disability with my reading. One book I’ve been meaning to read is Disabled Intimacy by Alice Wong. Disabled Intimacy is an anthology modeled the same way Disability Visibility is. This book touches on a lot of issues, from, race, to class, to kink and the pandemic.
The anthology collects works from many thinkers about disability including Marieke Nijkamp and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha whose book Care Work is also on my TBR.
Like any anthology I liked some pieces better than others. I enjoyed Unspooling which focuses on disabled love, talking about how queer love is interworked with it. I also enjoyed The Most Valuable Thing I Can Teach My Kid Is How to Lazy by Elliot Kukla which talks about the importance of rest in our face paced capitalist society, and how it’s especially important for disabled people to rest, and how rest can be a radical act.
Finally my favorite piece from the book is My Solemn Vow by Maria Town talking about commitment and marriage among the disabled community, something I think about and that is unique to the disabled community because of the way we get our benefits.
There is some controversy about one of the authors Mia Mingus being an abuser, but I need to look more into that to see the veracity of that claim.
Overall the book had more interesting pieces than not, and I felt relation with lots of the authors. I especially loved that it addressed some neurodivergency topics. However I would have liked to seen more about psychiatric conditions. That however is just a personal note and isn’t indicative of the quality of the book.
I’d give this book four stars over all, just because of the range and coverage of topics important to the disability community.
What is your favorite topic to read non-fiction about?
Rose's Book Garden 