This is one of those books where it does not feel right to rate it because you're then judging every authors' lived experiences and stories. Which just makes it even more important to read and understand what it's like to live and love as a disabled person.

As always, Alice Wong's work opened my eyes to perspectives I hadn't even considered. So appreciative of Wong's work--a must read for anyone but especially therapists wanting to work with the disabled community.

Thanks to Net Galley for the digital ARC.

Activist and writer Alice Wong edits another incredible collection of essays that showcase an expansive array of disabled folks' interpretations of intimacy. From taking sexy photos to the joy of solitude, caretaking and parenthood, to kink and pandemic protocol, the stories span a multitude of experiences and perspectives.

Disability is itself is also lovingly and implicitly reaffirmed to include those with degrees of physical and invisible differences--including psychological, neurodivergent and less well known chronic conditions.

I was especially grateful for the reflections on laziness and ableism (from an ADHD or chronic fatigue informed lens) and the chance to learn about so many new voices to seek out and follow.

Recommended for all my fellow spoonies and those who love us and anyone who is interested in learning some wisdom from the margins.

Review also posted to goodreads

I think a question on a lot of our minds recently has been "how do we get through this? What does a better world look like?". In reading books like The Future is Disabled by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Disability Intimacy edited by Alice Wong, it is clear that disabled folks, especially QTBIPOC disabled folks, have been developing the blueprint for us the entire time.

What can a world look like with physical, emotional, mental access? What can a world look like where we care for one another? Where there is freedom to exist, freedom to desire, freedom to love and be loved? The essays contained in Disability Intimacy begin to answer these questions.

If you know me, you know that I am not a big crier, especially with books. But from page one of this book, I was teary. I saw myself reflected on the pages but also saw the joy, the pain, the heartache, and more of existing in and resisting an ableist society.

I highly recommend picking up this book and sitting in the wisdom and the questions it poses. It is beautiful and challenging in the best way.

Disability Pride Month

I don't know why it took me so long to pick up this book. It was both informative and heartwarming. Disability isn't a monolith. The intersectionality between disability (and the differences within this), queerness, and people of color was handled with nuance. While the essays differed in length, and some meant more to me than others, I will say I both enjoyed myself and learned a lot.

📱 Thank you to NetGalley and Vintage

Alice Won's second edited collection is just as powerful as the first one. Will be coming back to this one.

An incredible collection of essays written by disabled writers and artists. What I appreciate is that the essays are all intersectional in nature and shine a light on the need for disability justice. I loved the essays about the writer's cat who also had disabilities and the essay about an artist's guide dog "London." (Can you tell I am an animal lover?). The essays around intimacy and longing and heartbreak are equally compelling - one beautifully using the metaphor about "cleaning the room inside of my heart clean and ready;" There are photo essays (with visual descriptions) such as with a woman and her personal assistant during Covid. Some of the essays are a bit more explicit but glad to see these included. These essays share a through-line on the importance of finding community - finding space with other disabled people. A creative thought offered was the concept of Disability Doulas who can help you enter the space when you are not yet fully embracing your disability identity. A really great and important read!

Thank you to Netgalley and Vintage Anchor for an ARC and I voluntarily left this review.

I really appreciated and enjoyed reading Disability Intimacy. I liked the different authors with differing perspectives and writing style.

Disability Intimacy was incredible. I almost don’t have the words to explain how much this book means to me. It is so important and should be read by every single person. There were of course some essays I enjoyed more than others, but the essays by Khadijah Queen and Elliot Kukla stood out to me as my favorites. They were written well and were so relatable.

I truly don’t think I could fully explain how important this book is, but I will forever be telling everyone about it!

A collection of short stories highlighting the lived experience and covering many different types of intimacy. It’s thoughtful, kind, powerful, and compassionate.

Thank you to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for my advanced digital copy!

I am always eager to read anything Alice Wong has worked on, so I was so excited to see this title. Just like in Disability Visibility, the essays cover so many different kind of lives and specifically the ways people who are disabled experience intimacy. For a variety of reasons, intimacy can be very different for people who have disabilities. This book does a really great job at showcasing that and the ableism that can frequently come with it. A definite must read for abled and disabled people alike.

An anthology that takes a tender, honest look at intimacy from the perspective of disabled folks. These essays explore the importance of community, caregiving, friendships, and access as they relate to the definition of intimacy. There is a lot of nuances when trying to define what intimacy could mean and this collection does an excellent job of showing the reader those nuances. Alice Wong has a gift for bringing together brilliant minds and compiling collections that will shift your perspective in the best way possible (see also Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century), and this collection was no exception. My own view of intimacy has been changed for the better.

Favorite Essays: “To the You That Used to Be Home: An Anatomy of a Disabled Heartbreak” by Mia Mingus, “Elegy for a Mask Mandate” by Ellen Samuels, “Staring at Curvature” by Travis Chi Wing Lau

Disability Intimacy is an important companion to Alice Wong’s first anthology, Disability Visibility. Composed of short essays that span a variety of experiences, Disability Intimacy defines intimacy beyond the sexual, beyond just touch. Here, and in a disability justice context, intimacy is also care and access, language use, assumptions. It is in the unspoken as much as the physical. It is in the whisper of verbal consent and careful questions as much as the yell for attention. I felt like I read from a wider perspective of disability in this anthology, though as others have noted, each essay was shorter, some appropriately so, but some felt cut off too soon. My favorites came from Mia Mingus, exploring access intimacy and Moya Bailey, imagining conversation with a disability doula, among many others.

Disability Intimacy is a stunning follow up to Alice Wong's 2020 collection Disability Visibility. I loved the first collection, and this second book lived up to my incredibly high expectations. One thing that I appreciate about Alice Wong's selections is the way the essays highlight disability intersectionality. We hear from authors and contributors with different gender identifications, sexual orientations, socioeconomic statuses, races, religions, and so on; and, perhaps more importantly, we see how all these facets of identity (and their intersection with disability) can have a profound effect on interpersonal relationships and intimacy.

In each chapter, I found myself repeatedly reading about the astonishing ways we (society) fail to make this world accessible to so many people (physical access, access to healthcare, access to mental healthcare, access to platforms for communication, access to transport, access to basic rights). And I wish that more people would read this book and sit with the discomfort that comes along with recognizing that these ableist systems are reinforced everywhere all the time.

I will also add that even though this is a collection that centers disabled voices and experiences, so many of the takeaways felt tremendously relatable to me (a non-disabled female). There were many incredible insights about bodily autonomy, consent, parenthood, communication within relationships, rest and work, and community care.

Thank you to NetGalley for my advanced reader copy.

This stunning collection of essays explores love, care, and desire with refreshing nuance and depth. I also felt deeply seen and resonated with many of the pieces. Highly recommend, especially the excellent audiobook with a full cast.

this was wonderful! like every collection, it had its stronger moments and its weaker ones, but this was a really striking and enlightening book.

An incredibly poignant and important book that I'm so glad I was able to read. Full of diverse and moving stories, this is a book worthy of a thousand stars.

Once again, Wong does a beautiful job of putting together a collection of diverse stories that show how intimacy can take form. I found this collection inspiring and powerful, and it expanded the ways that I think about intimacy and how I can show up for others.

Note: I'm a disabled writer too. Alice and I communicated a lot when Twitter was still Twitter. I know Alice and many of the authors in the book from online, but this is my honest opinion.

Alice is great at supporting other disabled writers' work and bringing diverse, marginalized perspectives together, along with all her other activism. Mia Mingus coined the terms "forced intimacy" and "access intimacy," and she is one of the book's many contributors and cited in it. Alice, Mia, and the other contributors emphasize that they all define disability and intimacy differently, in ways that sometimes contradict one another's. That's good. For example, some contributors to the book consider care work they give and receive a form of intimacy. Because of all the power imbalances that can occur in caregiving, some disabled people write in the book that they do not consider care work a form of intimacy. Contributors to the book find intimacy in care work, friendships, family, sex, activism, photography, food, history, and many other places. I'd just like to ask fellow readers to avoid generalizing or saying this book attempts to define disability or intimacy for all disabled people. Contributors are careful to clarify that people's experiences and opinions differ.

I loved this. Thanks for approving my ARC.

An incredibly moving and vulnerable collection of essays from a diverse group of disabled individuals and I am just so grateful that Alice Wong managed to find the strength and time to compile and edit this book in the midst of her own recent health challenges.

I was pleasantly surprised to discover that many of these essays were written by neurodivergent authors and there was a number that cover topics such as the complex caregiver-"patient" relationship and the toll that takes on both as well as the unique level of intimacy and trust involved in such relationships (something not talked about a lot).

Other essays talk about the challenges of finding romantic partners or taking control of their sexuality in various ways to celebrate and profit from their disabled bodies. All of these essays are deeply personal and offer new insights into disabled love, desire and intimacy and I couldn't have enjoyed it any more if I tried.

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an early digital copy of this incredible book. This is a must read for both disabled and able bodied folks alike and a wonderful companion to Wong's earlier book, Disability visibility.