Date/Time
Date(s) - 10/03/2026
1:30 pm - 2:30 pm

#HASTalks is a seminar series curated by The Department of Health, Aging & Society at McMaster University.

Hannah Quinn recently defended her dissertation at the University of Toronto in socio-cultural anthropology. Her work emerges at the intersection of critical disability studies, queer theory, and the anthropology of social life. By attending to the lived experiences of intellectually disabled people and those who support them in their communities, Hannah asks questions about deinstitutionalization, inclusion & exclusion, and intimacy. Based in Montreal, QC, Hannah is a researcher, writer, and scholar with her work appearing in journals such as Disability & Society and the Canadian Journal of Disability studies, as well as at installations at the Tangled Arts gallery in Toronto, ON. Her commitment to knowledge mobilization have led her to roles as a contributing editor for the Society for Cultural Anthropology, the Manager of the Ethnography Lab at the University of Toronto, and as a policy writer for numerous disability and gender rights organizations. She is currently working as a researcher at the Montreal University Health Centre Research Institute where she is bringing a disability justice framework to health studies projects and youth-focused research curriculum.

Companionship and crip intimacy: On expressions of intimacy, desire, and access to disability services in the lives of intellectually disabled adults

In this talk Hannah will discuss the crux of her dissertation research: the role of disability service provision in organizing the (presumably) disorganized intimacy of intellectually disabled adults and the alternate intimacies that emerge in the process. This talk draws on Hannah’s dissertation research on deinstitutionalization in Canada and the role of disability services in providing intellectually disabled people with independent living and social integration programs. Emerging from a deficit-model of disability, these programs are designed to mitigate the presumed social impairments of intellectually disabled people. Social skills training programs facilitate inclusion, purportedly addressing problems associated with social impairment: loneliness, isolation, and exclusion. Her dissertation explores how disability service staff inculcate disabled clients into a normative organization of intimacy that delineates who one ought to be intimate with, and how and where intimacy should occur. She analyzes staff efforts to organize disabled clients’ disorganized intimacy into a pre-given schema of social relations. Based on 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork at a disability service centre in Montreal, Quebec, she examines how disorganized intimacy is framed as the source of exclusion, placing the onus of social integration on the client which, in turn, shapes aspects of disabled life including sexuality, consent processes, employment, and housing.

She argues that disability services deploy a regime of intimacy that buttresses a range of hierarchies and categories, ultimately (re)producing the very segregation, exclusion, and eugenic logics it seeks to mitigate. The connection between how we organize intimacy and larger systems of power also means that, by doing intimacy differently, we can organize social life in alternative ways that value disabled life, knowledge, and desires. In this talk, Hannah identifies the non-normative intimacies disabled people develop to navigate and survive ableist systems—what she calls crip intimacies. She discusses and explores the intimacies of two key interlocutors—Gemma and Chris—and what they call their companionship. In her field site, companionship functions as a relationship through which disabled clients access disability services and approximate other relational modes (such as couple marriage) that they are often excluded from. For these reasons, companionships are idealized among service staff and caregivers. But attention to companionship among disabled adults also offers insights into sexual ableism, homophobia, and infantilization in the lies of intellectually disabled adults. Gemma and Chris’ companionship allows them to navigate surveillance and express intimacies that meet their access needs and own desires, all while confounding staff and caregivers. Companionship thus emerges as an ethnographically significant relational mode for exploring the ways disabled adults resist the organization of their intimacies and opens questions about the organization of care and disability service access in the lives of adult and ageing disabled people.

ALL are welcome to attend this FREE online session! Register for this event via Zoom.

Please note: This session may be recorded. Please be aware that any materials entered, exchanged, or viewed by participants during the session may be recorded.