Inge Blockmans

“Not Wishing to Be the White Rhino in the Crowd”: Disability-Disclosure at University

This article reports on a qualitative study identifying the drivers for and boundaries to disability-disclosure in interability interactions as experienced by 13 students with physical impairments at five Belgian higher education institutions. Through surveys and in-depth interviews, the study explored whether the students experience, prefer, and expect differences in communication about their impairments with temporarily able-bodied peers, instructors, and staff. Interviews provided insight into the nuances of disclosure and topic avoidance decisions that differ by disclosure target: disability-disclosure is mainly a balancing act between fulfilling physical needs and maintaining a normal, positive identity. The visibility of impairments seems to play a minor role in the students’ initial orientation toward disclosing. The functions of disability-disclosure as posited by the Communication Predicament of Disability Model and the CARE-keys to effective interability communication (i.e., Contact, Ask, Respect, Empathy) are discussed as well as the implications of the findings for Communication Accommodation Theory.

The intra-active production of normativity and difference

ABSTRACT Drawing on memory stories told in a collective biography workshop about children’s encounters with schooling, this paper experiments with re-imagining the child-student-subject as an ‘emergent intracorporeal multiplicity’ [Fritsch, K. 2015. “Desiring Disability Differently: Neoliberalism, Heterotopic Imagination and Intra-Corporeal Configurations.” Foucault Studies 19: 43–66, 51]. From the feminist new materialist perspective that the authors work with, the child is configured not as an entity prior to, or separate from, encounters with education systems, but emergent with-in them. This paper focuses on difference in human relations, and in particular on the intersections of disability and gender. It does so not in terms of essential characteristics of individuals, but as emergent, in-the-moment, with others. In focussing on the detail of lives-in-their-making, the authors ask, with Barad [2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press], if we are interested in justice, how we are to ‘understand our role in helping constitute who and what come to matter?’

The Influence of Magazines on Men: Normalizing and Challenging Young Men’s Prejudice with ‘Lads’ Mags’

Social psychologists have argued that popular U.K. and U.S. men’s magazines known as “lads’ mags” have normalized hostile sexism among young men. Three studies develop this argument. First, a survey of 423 young U.K. men found that ambivalent sexism predicted attitudes toward the consumption of lads’ mags, but not other forms of direct sexual consumption (paying for sex or patronizing strip clubs). Second, Study 2 (N = 81) found that young men low in sexism rated sexist jokes as less hostile toward women, but not as either funnier nor more ironic, when those jokes were presented within a lads’ mags context. These findings refute the idea that young men readily read lads’ mags’ sexism as ironic or “harmless fun.” They show instead that placing sexist jokes in lads’ mags contexts makes them appear less hostile. The third study (N = 275) demonstrated that young men perceived lads’ mags as less legitimate after attempting to distinguish the contents of lads’ mags from rapists’ legitimations of their crimes. Implications for contemporary studies of masculinities and consumption are discussed.

Animating disability differently : mobilizing a heterotopian imagination

This article takes up Goodley’s challenge to explore the ways in which poststructuralist research methodologies open up new ways of thinking about encounters with disability. Working with the materiality of their own encounters with disability and the conceptual possibilities opened up in poststructuralist and new materialist thought, the six authors deconstruct the ability/disability binary through animating disability differently. They draw on memories generated in a collective biography workshop to explore the ways in which concepts, such as heterotopia, can be put to work to mobilize a humanity-in-common that is both multiple and open to differenciation, that is, to continuously becoming different.

Encounters With the White Coat: Confessions of a Sexuality and Disability Researcher in a Wheelchair in Becoming:

In this autoethnographic essay, I will deconstruct my own being and becoming of a female researcher with a spinal cord injury (SCI) in the first half of my doctoral research on the sexual well-being of women with SCI, more specifically in the aftermath of a 1-month internship at a rehabilitation hospital where I assisted the health care team and had informal conversations with residents. Following Barad’s plead for diffractive methodologies, I aim to track interference patterns of the range of relationalities—imagined or mobilized by myself or by others—that I embraced or shied away from during my fieldwork based on field notes and memory to discover from them the constant process of my own becoming-in-the-world with a “broken body.”