Los métodos y las técnicas

It is where the sexual intention concerns not the goal of reproduction, but the expression of desire as such, that the disqualifi cation of disabled people from the discourses of pleasure is at its most acute. (Shildrick 2009: 67) A dominant reading of Alex and Isobel’s narrative – one couched in con-temporary notions of disability as fl aw and lack – would view this is an account of a family trying to contain the clumsy and inept expressions of sexuality of a body unable to function ably. This reading is common in a contemporary society where ‘disability is fi rst, foremost, and seem-ingly forever “not”’ (Titchkosky 2008: 125). But, while ‘the body (as thing, as object) is conditioned by its external circumstances; it is more:

it overfl ows its conceptual confi nes’ (Titchkosky 2008: 130). Isobel and Alex’s story requires us to reconceptualise how disability and sex inter-sect in ways that overfl ow in terms of meaning-making, relationality and connection.

Interconnection

Deleuzian concepts both illuminate and are illuminated by the story of Isobel and Alex. Initially, it is easy to read the narrative in terms of a body without organs. A key site for the politicisation of disabled people can be found in Deleuze and Guattari’s work in so far as ‘they destabilize, perhaps at times explode, such individualized understand-ings of body/self/psychology/identity – in order to make connections with other bodies and entities. The body-without-organs provides us with an alternative conception to that of the bounded impaired-as-useless body that is so often conceived in our societies’ (Goodley 2009:

260). Alex demands that Isobel publicly and explicitly addresses the subject of masturbation: an act that might be deemed the epitome of an individual’s secret, private life (Žižek 2008). The verbal protocol sur-rounding masturbation is normally a masculinised achievement shared between ‘boys’, whereas Alex is relating his experience to his mother. In

‘outing’ his body Alex inevitably shifts his body from a self-contained privatised bounded unitary-like subject to a position of reaching out for connection with other bodies (whether or not those bodies necessar-ily want to connect). Alex displays his body’s inherent fl uidity, lack of completion and interconnection with other bodies (Shildrick 2009: 25).

The body without organs offers a ‘way out’ through moving the loca-tion of desire outside of the fi xed boundaries of the body-as-organism,

heralding connections with others (Goodley 2007a: 153). For Shildrick, such a body turns toward the positivity of intercorporeality rather than an anxiety about its dangerous signifi cations: ‘The body without organs, the body in a process of corporeal becoming, that mobilises desire as a fl uid indeterminacy that has no fi xed aim or object, and which could always be otherwise’ (Shildrick 2009: 102, 132).

Alex and Isobel open up a dialogue not only about the practice of masturbation (which we might easily understand in terms of desire as it is normatively constituted in relation to something we lack) but also about desire as desire (and the limits that are often placed upon the desires of young and disabled people). This Deleuzian understanding of sexuality ‘becomes, then, a network of fl ows, energies and capacities that are always open to transformation, and so cannot be determined in advance’ (Shildrick 2009: 132). This moves our understanding of desire away from genital sexuality per se toward a more expansive notion of desire. Funnily enough, in speaking of coke and roast chicken, Alex broadens and popularises the notion of what is to be desired. This pushes us to think about desire in an immanent sense: is it possible to desire desire rather than desire what we assume we lack? Can we think in terms of a positive and productive play of desire: to move away from the notion that desire represents or substitutes for an originary loss to, instead, ‘a desire that maps the multiplicity of becoming’ (Shildrick 2009: 145)? What other forms of desire are in play in addition to the heteronormative and ableist forms of desire associated with genital sex-uality? A desiring body exists, then, ‘only by making connections in the fl ux and fl ow of desire that is without a fi xed aim or object’ (Shildrick, 2009: 10). The desiring of ordinary food and drink is a temporal feature of everyday life – is Alex articulating a mundane and therefore accessible map of desire?

Desire

The desiring body of Alex becomes a desiring body without organs – a body demanding that others confront desire, a desire that is shared, experienced and embodied between and within his relationships with his mothers and sisters. Indeed, the self-arousal in school is also a more public presentation of desire. It speaks of an ‘erotics of connec-tion’ (Shildrick 2000: 149) rather than an erotics of heteronormativity or genital sexuality. In some senses, following Wilkerson (2002), Alex returns us to a more polymorphous view of sexuality/desire than the constrained view of heterosexual vaginal intercourse promulgated by

patriarchal norms. He invites us to rethink bodies and their sexualities.

Rather than viewing the body without organs as unruly desire, ‘To a Deleuzian, the intermeshed mode of life signals that form of assem-blage that circumvents the blockage of rigid subjectivity and opens on to productive new ways of becoming in the world’ (Shildrick 2009:

28).

Alex’s story might start with masturbation but soon spins off along many lines of fl ight, many of them about ‘connectivity and linkage’,

‘desiring-production’, or ‘becoming along multiple lines of fl ight’

(Shildrick 2009: 137–8). Crucial to a Deleuzian celebration of the disabled self-as-becoming through connection with others is a breaking down of the ‘bounded limits of the singular self’ (Shildrick 2009: 138).

This speaks not to a ‘settled self but to a lifelong process of becoming with others in an open encounter that constitutes both self and other. As exemplars of non-normativity, those with disabilities cannot but disrupt and contest the modernist subject’s illusion of purity, containment and self-control’ (Shildrick 2009: 28–9). Alex’s sharing of which girls he likes disrupts the embarrassment and secrecy typical of adolescent rela-tionships. Alex and his mother are caught up in a moment of embodied revolution: challenging the typical discourses that fold around youthful desire and disabled bodies. Their story is an important antidote to lack-based notions of desire which owe much to psychoanalysis. Deleuze’s work with Guattari was, to some extent, a reaction against Freudian and Lacanian conceptions of desire. According to the latter:

The child will always lack that initial desire of the mother and, simultane-ously, fi nd the mother (and many others) lacking. We are also always in lack, as we seek out the fantasized original object (the mother) that desired us as we desired them: the ‘objet-petit-a’. We desire an idealized other to confer perfection on us, to see us as whole and total in their eyes, as special, unique and endearing. Consequently, we spend our lives trying to fi nd dif-ferent forms of wholeness (the imago) and objet-petit-a (the m/other who desired us), seeking the ‘perfect job’, ‘perfect partner’, ‘perfect family’ and so on (which are classically referred to as ‘ego ideals’ in psychoanalysis).

Desire is insatiable; a hopeless attempt to fi nd that which desired us (the original object) through object-petit-a. (Goodley 2011: 148)

For Deleuze and Guattari desire is a far more productive affair. Indeed, as Shildrick observes, because the disabled body is often viewed as amongst the most lacking, it makes sense to start with disability as the place to turn desire on its head (Shildrick 2009). Similarly, Titchkosky asks:

What possible relations to our being-in-the-world take shape as the experi-ence of limit? And, how might the experiexperi-ence of limit, as distasteful as it often seems, be imbued with the possibility of knowing the world differ-ently and consequdiffer-ently making a different world? (Titchkosky 2008: 116) While Titchkosky’s approach is explicitly phenomenological, her use of the concept of the sensorium (how the senses are organised) resonates with the Deleuzian project of examining our becoming-in-the-world as the product of ‘fl ows, energies and intensities of nomadic wanderings’, in an ‘ever-expansive connectivity of human becomings’ (Shildrick 2009: 157). As the narrative details, Isobel feels that this is a part of her son’s life she was not expecting to be involved in. She is interconnected with an area of his life which is usually ‘private’. It is precisely because Alex has made desire public that the very nature of desire morphs and changes. For Alex, the sensorium he fi nd himself in affords desire. The sexuality of the embodied subject is no longer a matter of internal drives but of mutual becomings (Shildrick 2009: 30).

Mutuality, of course, should not be confused with consensus. Any relationship, but particularly a parent-child relationship, will be imbued with confl ict, uncertainty and diffi culty. That Isobel and her partner decide not to physically demonstrate a ‘correct method’ of masturba-tion hints at the diffi culties present in discourses of sexuality between parents and their children. However, the fact that Isobel and her family engage with Alex’s sexuality in thoughtful, considered and careful ways suggests that, perhaps, disability and sexuality overlap with one another in a way that leads onto a Deleuzian pedagogy of the concept: the means to fi gure out a way of becoming-in-the-world ‘that desires the strange and opens up to new linkages and provisional incorporations’ (Shildrick 2009: 133). This mirrors Titchkosky’s argument that disability offers a ‘self-refl ective space where we confront, not the “true nature” of embodiment, but the “true character” of all that our culture can make of embodiment as well as how we might live with and through these bodies and their placement in culture’ (Titchkosky 2008: 104).

A Deleuzian analysis reconfi gures human relationships in terms of their rhizomatic connections. What might be read as Isobel struggling with her son’s sexuality is, instead, recast as a rhizomatic encounter in which we struggle to separate Alex’s expression of sexual desire from the desire of Isobel for Alex to become. We do not know what comes fi rst and we are at a loss to see when the encounter will end; but this rhizomatic quality of the relationship between mother and son – and between a familial promotion of the sexual rights of disabled people

against a socio-political background which aims to deny these rights – opens up possibilities for Alex and his family to become-in-the-world.

Becoming for Alex is a joint project between himself, his family and the State – indeed rights and advocacy may well be articulated by his sisters, as they come to understand that ‘even’ disabled people have desires.

But the personal here can never be private. Disability and sexuality converge to promote discussion about their politicisation. Alex enacts Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘desiring-machines’ which ‘speak to all manner of couplings . . . that push the experiences of embodiment to a different plane that is as hospitable to disabled people as it is to any others’ (Shildrick 2009: 140). Alex and Isobel align in ways that spark discussion about a young person’s sexuality; a connection which we are sure would translate well to other families. Following Titchkosky, dis-ability serves as ‘an occasion to open ourselves up to the consequences of acting’ and, perhaps more radically, ‘as an occasion to reconsider the meaning of identity politics and all the other ways we have of relating to ourselves and to others’ (Titchkosky 2008: 47, 16). To this we could add that disability and sexuality might join together to open up new ways of enacting desire.