Latest news with #disabledjoy
Globe and Mail
17-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Globe and Mail
Andrew Gurza wants you to know disabled people still have sex lives
The Globe and Mail's Accessibility Profiles by Graham Isador feature conversations highlighting disabled artists, creators and community leaders. Andrew Gurza wants to make you uncomfortable. It's a major component of their newest work, Notes from a Queer Cripple: How to Cultivate Queer Disabled Joy (and Be Hot While Doing It!). Part memoir, part self-help guide for the disabled, the book unpacks Gurza's sex life – the good, the bad and the often hilarious – with unflinching honesty, offering readers insight into the day-to-day realities of life with severe access needs. Born with cerebral palsy, the award-winning disability consultant, writer and activist wanted to share a perspective rarely seen in the media. Through personal anecdotes and playful narration, Gurza emphasizes that they have wants, desires and needs just like everyone else. Getting those needs met often requires a bit more effort and thought than most people are used to. Recently The Globe talked to the author about their book, awkward conversations and how to address ableism. You've talked about how conversations around disability and sex, particularly queer sex, are basically non-existent. Is that why you decided to write this book? I think people are afraid to hear about a disabled person being sexual. This book is about that. It's also an urgent call for the queer community – specifically the queer male community – to do a lot better when it comes to ableism. I think they're afraid to broach the idea that they're not as inclusive as they say. Maybe they haven't been willing to look at a disabled person in their space before. Someone saying I'm a sexual being, just like they are. You call yourself a 'queer cripple.' It's also in your book title. That's a term other people might take offence to. Why do you refer to yourself that way? I use the phrase queer cripple quite intentionally. For me, they're terms of reclamation. It's a way of being like: you can't hurt me, I've already used the most derogatory terms around disability and queerness that somebody could use. I know it's gonna make people slightly squirm in their seats. Both words have a really dark past. They're derogatory. They have shock value. I do it without irony. I do it because I know that it's going to drum up conversation and make people pay attention. Do you get a kick out of that shock value? Yeah, it's kind of fun. When I was a kid, my presence in a room would automatically make people uncomfortable. I could see them stiffen up. I could tell they weren't sure how to navigate this person in a wheelchair who needed all this support. As I got older I started pushing back against the awkwardness. If you're already going to feel uncomfortable, why don't I deliberately make you uncomfortable to see what happens? But the hope is I can use that discomfort to start a conversation. Where do you think that discomfort comes from? It's okay to be uncomfortable. I want to stress that. Most people don't want to show that they're uncomfortable, but when you encounter somebody with a disability – especially somebody with my level of disability, who needs help with pretty much everything – the uncomfortability comes to the surface. It's fun to play with that but we also need bridges between the non-disabled and the disabled. I think people are just afraid because they haven't been exposed to disability in their personal life. I believe as disabled people, we have to give them grace to feel that discomfort and help them move it through. The book also talks about finding joy in disability. That's really refreshing to me. Acknowledging the hardships while noting it isn't always doom and gloom. I walk a really kind of tight rope line between the humour and the serious stuff. I wanted it to be funny. I could have written a hugely academic, super dry, book about sex and disability. That would have been fine, but I needed to bring people into this experience. I wanted to give them a way in and the only way that I know how to do that is through stupid humour and trying to find brighter moments in addition to the hard stuff. The book is a call for the queer community to do better. It's a call for all of us to look for the disabled joy where we can – small wins, big wins, finding ways to enjoy your body – and to laugh a little bit about the inaccessibility of a disabled person just trying to have a sex life, and how awkward, absurd and ridiculous that can sometimes be.
The Guardian
06-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Design and Disability review – ‘A world-shaping, boundary-breaking joy of a show'
Running through each section of this tremendous show is something mainstream society doesn't get to see very often: disabled joy. It's there in the harness that allows deaf and hearing-impaired gig-goers to feel music as vibrations on their chest. It's there in the vibrant clothes. It's there – certainly – in the all-purpose hands-free vibrator (yes, really). But it's not just the individual items that exude this joy. It's the themes of community action and care that show up again and again, and the reframing of the very concept of disability – from the 'medical problem' society sees to the proud identity we know it to be. This show, which takes a wide-ranging look at how disabled people have fashioned the world to better represent ourselves and better suit our needs, is divided into three parts: Visibility, Tools and Living. In Visibility, we see the evolution of accessible fashion from sterile to cool, and how disabled people have used photography to reclaim our images and bodies. In Tools, we see how disabled people have adapted everything from kitchen utensils to computers to allow us to get things done. And in Living, we see how we have demanded cultural and architectural change so that we can participate in society as equals. The exhibition does a great job of including the full range of impairments disabled people have. There's a bike with a built-in leg brace and a video explaining the concept of deaf space (an architectural idea about how spaces can be designed to support lip-reading and the use of BSL). There's a self-tightening shoe and the original fidget-spinner, designed to help autistic and other neurodivergent people. In this way, the exhibition goes far beyond the tired assumption that access means a ramp. It is also great to see disability-led design from all areas of life – not just care and housing, but also gaming, socialising, working, travelling, urban-planning and more. So often disability is treated as a monolithic experience, but the V&A is showing it in all its diverse, multifaceted glory. The exhibition also has a deliberate focus on design not only for disabled people but by disabled people. In a world in which people often make assumptions about our needs, and presume to speak on our behalf, this is very welcome. Many of the projects and products featured are DIY inventions, moulded out of necessity by disabled people who weren't able to buy the tools they needed. Others are the work of grassroots organising groups, or individual disabled people leveraging their jobs at big companies to create change. Taken together, these items and their stories serve as a powerful reminder of disabled people's often-overlooked agency, and a refutation of the idea that we are merely the recipients of help. We can and do help ourselves. As Tristram Hunt, the former Labour MP who is now the V&A's director, emphasised at the exhibition's launch, the idea is for it to embody the famous disability rights slogan: 'Nothing about us without us.' It truly does. This slogan applies politically as well as culturally. And what I like most about the exhibition is that it does not shy away from the inherently political nature of disability. Many objects on display are directly linked to the long fight for disability rights: one of the first things you see is a T-shirt emblazoned with the 'Piss on Pity' slogan from the 1990 Block Telethon campaign. There are photos of disabled people stopping buses during the Campaign for Accessible Transport, as well as pieces related to the more recent (and ongoing) cuts to disability benefits. But beyond referencing these discrete historical events, the exhibition also recognises that existing, thriving and finding joy as a disabled person in an ableist world is a political – often radical – act. That radicalism is reinforced by the show's emphasis on the intersection between disability and other marginalised identities, with pieces linked to the Black Panthers and queer culture. This will feel intimately familiar to many disabled visitors, for whom it will be lovely to see their lived experiences reflected at a prestigious arts institution, but will hopefully provide a new perspective for nondisabled viewers, many of whom will never have seen disability and disabled lives presented in this way. That's what makes Design and Disability so good. It takes what disabled people know to be true – that we are creative, that we are innovators, that our exclusion comes from a world not built for us, that our lives are political – and makes those ideas interesting and accessible for everyone. Disability culture is vibrant and fun, boundary-breaking and world-shaping. So is this exhibition. Design and Disability is at the V&A, London, from Saturday until 15 February 2026
