Caitlin Manuel

MA Thesis: “Cultivating Death-worlds: Intellectual/Developmental Disability, Sex, and Intimacy in Ontario’s Sex Education and Developmental Services Policies”

Abstract: This thesis examines discourse within Ontario’s sex education curricula and developmental services for intellectually/developmentally disabled (IDD) people, and how these provincial policies cultivate and rationalize contemporary death-worlds for IDD communities. Drawing from crip and queer perspectives of IDD, sex, and intimacy, I use critical discourse analysis to convey the ways Ontario upholds the settler colonial capitalist project through processes of normalization and the appropriation of language from community models of care. Using necropolitics as my theoretical framework, I show how normate fears of crips and queers are used to reproduce IDD death-worlds through the silent continuation of segregating, isolating, and sexually sterilizing IDD people. Despite Ontario’s hyper-surveillance and attempts to sanitize IDD sex and intimacy, IDD communities exist, and they will continue to exist, transgress, love, “fuck”, hold hands, and establish new sexual and intimate boundaries that will grow and imagine new possibilities.

Supervisor: Patrizia Gentile

Research interests: within intersections of disability and sexuality in the context of eugenics as necropower, research to date focuses on disabled and Mad justice in the context of education and sex and sexuality, as well as developmental services policy, and sex education policy.