Reflections on “Disability Intimacy”
Reflections on “Disability Intimacy”
Book Review: Disability Intimacy: Essays on Love, Care, and Desire by Alice Wong
by Zoe Burroughs, social media intern
When I picked up Alice Wong’s Disability Intimacy, I was greeted with a remarkably constructed manifesto that shared the lived reality of the contemporary disability experience. The anthology is a collective of essays on love, care, and desire that features a diverse community of voices with an array of experiences in the realm of intimacy. I was originally introduced to Alice Wong by her book, Disability Visibility, which completely deconstructed the way that I conceptualize the disabled experience, ableism, and disability joy. Disability Intimacy is the much anticipated follow-up from Alice Wong that was published on April 30th, 2024. I was inspired to review this book in particular to honor Wong’s recent passing in November of this year. As of the past couple of years, Alice Wong has been rightfully celebrated as one of the leading voices in disability activism. She has always remained uncompromising in her views, simultaneously bold and revolutionary while also being communal and surprisingly vulnerable. She doesn’t ask for permission to be messy, sexual, angry, or tender, instead, she simply is. By celebrating these imperfections, Wong creates space in Disability Intimacy for all of us to imagine
intimacy beyond the narrow scripts we’ve been handed by our heteronormative, able-bodied society. As someone who is extremely passionate about queer theory and disability advocacy, I admired how Wong acknowledged the fact that these areas of study exist in collaboration with each other. Her essays insist that disabled people- especially disabled queer people of color- deserve pleasure, desire, and care that reflect the authentic, human experience.
Wong writes at the crossroads of disability justice, queer identity, and Asian American experience. As a disabled, queer, Asian American woman who uses a ventilator, Alice embodies intersectionality in ways that complicate traditional narratives. Her essays demonstrate how ableism, racism, queerphobia, and misogyny compound and create unique experiences of marginalization and resilience. Wong doesn’t perform gratitude or resilience. She’s angry about inaccessibility. She’s frank about ableism within progressive spaces. She talks about medical trauma and the violence of being constantly surveilled, questioned, and denied autonomy. Her essays forced me to confront my own internalized ableism and the ways I’ve unconsciously accepted narratives that equate independence with worth.
As I was reading Disability Intimacy, I was struck by Wong’s refusal to center abled-comfort. She doesn’t explain away her needs or apologize for the technology that keeps her alive. Instead, she writes about making out with ventilators humming in the background, about the eroticism of interdependence, about how care work and desire aren’t opposites but can be deeply intertwined. Wong doesn’t shy away from the reality that her body requires support, adaptation, and creativity. She reclaims the word “burden” and asks us to consider what becomes possible when we stop treating interdependence as shameful. For someone invested in sexual liberation for all bodies, this reframing felt like coming home. In fact, her honesty about the complexities of care relationships challenged my romanticized notions of community support. Care can be loving and resentful, sustaining and exhausting, chosen and obligated. Wong doesn’t resolve these tensions, and that refusal to provide easy answers is precisely what makes her work so important.
If you’re interested in disability studies, queer theory, or sexual liberation, this book needs to be on your reading list! Wong writes accessibly without dumbing down complex ideas. She offers frameworks for thinking about consent, autonomy, pleasure, and care that expand far beyond contemporary academia. Disability Intimacy isn’t just a book about disabled people for disabled people. It’s a book about what it means to be human, embodied, vulnerable, and hungry for connection. Wong’s essays model a kind of fierce tenderness that demands justice while celebrating pleasure and honoring personal stories. For anyone interested in building worlds where all bodies are valued and where care is recognized as collective work, this book is essential. Wong doesn’t offer blueprints, but she offers permission to imagine differently and the tools to start building those new imaginings into reality.
