#forcedintimacy — Public Fediverse posts

Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #forcedintimacy, aggregated by home.social.

Ryan Boren @[email protected] · 2024-11-27 · 18:50 UTC
In Which We Answer Some Questions
Here are some questions posed to us for inclusion in an allied organization’s newsletter. We cover community art, direct giving, research, ableism, and more.

Table of Contents
- The artwork on your website is amazing, where does it come from?
  Featured Art
  It’s gonna be an art party.
- What is your latest research on?
- What does direct support look like for your organization? The website mentions a lot about mutual aid?
- How can individuals reading get involved in mutual aid in their communities?
- What are some wins you want to share with the community at large?
- What are some barriers you want the community at large to know about regarding ableism?
- How can we best support Stimpunks.org?
- How can Non-Disabled People show up better? And love better?
- I love how activist research is also about transformative action. Can you speak more to this?
- The ideas of community, interdependence, and the political really spoke to me, can you speak more on this?
- “We recognize that there is no justice that neglects disability.” (Philosophy – Stimpunks Foundation)
- I really like these ideas: Community is resistance. Asking for help. Showing up to give help. Collaboration.
The artwork on your website is amazing, where does it come from?
Our art comes from our community. We practice constructionism and actively engage in constructing things in the world. Practicing our art makes our souls grow.

Featured Art
“Floralis (Flourite Spheralite)” by Adriel Jeremiah Wool is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 About the art: Floralis (Flourite Spheralite)
Description: A bursting kaleidoscopic geometrical form with 4 sides of symmetry pointing angularly to each of the four corners of a square shaped canvas against a dark grey textured wall. There is a small red shaped plus at the very center, surrounded by orangish-peach and periwinkle butterfly like shapes at 45 degree angles from each other aligned to the mid center going up and also to the sides. The butterfly shapes are encased in a deeper red flower like shape before a region of light blue geometric textures. Near the corners are feathered white, dark grey-purple, burgundy and orange feather like edges.
About the artist: Adriel Jeremiah Wool
Our featured artist is Adriel Jeremiah Wool.
Adriel Jeremiah is an computer programmer with a deep background in origami and folding. This artwork is an extension of a world view involving folding; often involving higher dimensional spaces. Many of these designs contain the mathematical magic of the transcendental numbers of nature, and all of them are the extension of the provisions of space itself; to be both physically folded, and conceptually folded, circularily and across many levels of expression.Shop Art by Adriel
His spectacular new piece derives its color stream from a fluorite crystal that has a spheralite imperfection / inclusion (the red, purple, and orange).
AJ describes what these fractal pieces are in this accordion. Their construction will broaden your perspective on perspective.My artwork is digital photography in a world where objects exist in more than 3 dimensions, and where no known means of physical representation has yet been discovered to exist.
AJ is a regular contributor at Stimpunks. He kindly licenses his work as free cultural work. He helps us tell our stories with his art, music, photography, videos, audio engineering, poetry, prose, and lived experience.
AJ has a gallery in Ketchum, Idaho. Drop by if you’re around. He tries to make it a welcoming third place.
Stimpunks is gently debugging society.
The charity protects, helps and comforts individuals, while pointing out library-level flaws in some of the concepts that end up harming those individuals.
This help is profoundly wonderful, morally and functionally coherent to great need, and as true as a pure circle in its cause-and-effect form.
Adriel Jeremiah Wool
About the process: My artwork is digital photography in a world where objects exist in more than 3 dimensions, and where no known means of physical representation has yet been discovered to exist.
The artist hopes to convey this: that the universe is given forth folded and unfolded. Although explicit understanding helps, it is too cumbersome, and should only provide refinement to something already greater that exists.
That greater thing is what was given to the artist first by the practice of origami. An enlivening of the intuitive mind, experience with a universe of many dimensions, and the promise of creation revealed when one folds a flat square into the likeness of a higher dimensional thing. That inspiration reaches a young mind in a powerful way.
The artist wants the viewer to see proof of what their intuitive mind already knows is true, the universe is a multidimensional phenomenon and the ability to understand its nature already exists within us each.
The artist hopes the viewer will be inspired to seek the understanding of freedoms available to the individual inspired by the exposure to artistic expressions, and of a nature of dimensionality unimaginably greater than the object presented here.
Adriel Jeremiah Wool
A time has come to again look at changes in the way technology allows us to see the world and experience it. First was the human eye, with a lens made of flesh. Later humans developed a replacement for the eye but in the form and fashion of the lens of the eye; this time it was made of glass doped with metals to enhance its control of light. To see, the human eye has a retina filled with responsive cells which look for contrast and color.
Technology has allowed us to create a replacement for the retina called a CCD with metals which respond to color and report those values to a microchip which converts them to bits and bytes for storage. I will present to you the same extension of sight by explaining how the images you will see come into existence.
In my artwork the landscape is created via the execution of a seed of a formula, allowed to grow and flourish in a mathematical set of steps. In a similar way, crystals grow underground in a cave over many millennia but they follow a seed of a universal pattern related to their atomic structure and facilitated by the chemical nature of their environments. In our regular world, we have 3 directions we can move, forward-back, up-down and left-right, but these crystals can move in another set of directions allowed by the universe and mathematics. They are, and must be considered elements of nature, and it follows that the methods used to convey them must be considered legitimate tools of expression.
A crystal starts at a virtual geometric position, a virtual center, then it mathematically and procedurally grows outward and inward according to a seed formula. However it exists in a dark world devoid of light and color; it is only a cloud of form. As an artist, I create an eye with a lens which follows the same mathematical processes as the lens of a camera and the eye itself. I situate the virtual eye to be gazing upon the crystal as I create sources of light which will illuminate the crystal and reflect light back to the lens.
As an artist I imbue color to the crystal, I imbue reflectivity, I imbue refractability, and I imbue density or transparency exactly towards the same purpose as a painter would do, in combining pigmented oils on canvas with a brush in his or her hand.
My artwork is digital photography in a world where objects exist in more than 3 dimensions, and where no known means of physical representation has yet been discovered to exist.
Adriel Jeremiah Wool

It’s gonna be an art party.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZRFkJsGNjI
```
We’re gonna make, make something great for
All of us to see and appreciate
It’s gonna be an art party
It’s gonna be an art party

Come on over it’s time to start
It’s a great big party where we make and share art
```
Art Party (feat. Portugal. The Man & Paul Williams) – YouTube

What is your latest research on?
Monotropism, neuroqueer learning spaces, and Cavendish Space.

What does direct support look like for your organization? The website mentions a lot about mutual aid?
Direct support includes, first and foremost, giving people money with no strings attached. Folks know what they need and how best to spend the money. We also help people navigate our systems by filling forms and making calls for them. We provide warm lines and peer respite. We practice library economies, competency networks, sharing spoons, and support swapping.
“Mutuality is a feeling, an action, and a relationship based on shared benefit between individuals and groups in a society. It materialises in many, many ways and is arguably a universal constant of our human nature. We rely on mutuality to survive and progress through our day to day life.” (Andrewism)
“When systems of power fail, it is mutuality—neighbours helping neighbours—that holds communities together.” (Andrewism)

How can individuals reading get involved in mutual aid in their communities?
Start with pod mapping.
1. Find a few people.
2. Identify your zone.
3. Invite neighbors.
4. Get a name.
5. Have conversations.
6. Support each other.
Source: Mutual Aid 101 – Google Slides

What are some wins you want to share with the community at large?
Our Map of Monotropic Experiences has been widely shared and incorporated into care settings and training.

What are some barriers you want the community at large to know about regarding ableism?
We live in an age of mass behaviorism. Behaviorism such as ABA and PBS are rife in education and healthcare settings. “Behaviorism is a dehumanizing mechanism of learning that reduces human beings to simple inputs and outputs. There is an ever-growing body of research suggesting that behaviorism is not only harmful to how we learn, but is also oppressive, ableist, and racist.” (Human Restoration Project)
Behaviorist education is ableist education. Behaviorist healthcare is ableist healthcare.

How can we best support Stimpunks.org?
- Read our website.
- Share our website.
- Amplify us on social media.
- Give whatever you can, be it time or money or attention.
How can Non-Disabled People show up better? And love better?
We exist as friction. Load-share the burden of existing as friction.
- Promote and practice access intimacy instead of forced intimacy.
- Question the narratives of wellness, and engage in critical wellness instead.
- Reframe yourself and others. Help people reframe from the pathology paradigm and medical model to the neurodiversity paradigm and biopsychosocial model. This is hard and important work necessary to all other work. Change the narrative. Start reframing.
- Advocate for accessibility at school, work, and in your community.
- Be a threat to inequity in your spheres of influence.
- Combat the myths.
- Use and promote Identity First Language.
- Elevate care as infrastructure. Stimpunks exists because our systems effectively don’t.
- Celebrate our interdependence!
I love how activist research is also about transformative action. Can you speak more to this?
“three characteristics that delineate activist research from other types of research:”
(1) combination of knowledge production and transformative action;
(2) systematic multi-level collaboration; and
(3) challenges to power.
(Denisha Jones)
A hallmark of good research is that it embraces epistemic justice and rejects scientism.
Another hallmark of good research is naming the systems of power. If you’re not naming the systems of power in your research, you’re missing a vital component.

The ideas of community, interdependence, and the political really spoke to me, can you speak more on this?
In the past, the disability rights movement focused on independence, including it as one of the pillars of the ADA. Disability Justice moves away from independence framing, because independence is a myth.
“I am fighting for an interdependence that embraces need and tells the truth: no one does it on their own and the myth of independence is just that, a myth.” (Mia Mingus)
“Access intimacy is interdependence in action.” (Mia Mingus)
“It is time to celebrate our interdependence!” (Jorn Bettin)

“We recognize that there is no justice that neglects disability.” (Philosophy – Stimpunks Foundation)
Working at my org I really believe this and feel that everyone who works here also believes this. We cannot neglect disability in our policy and conversations and our care. If you have anything to add to this.
There is no path to justice that does not involve direct confrontation with ableism and inaccessibility. To neglect disability is to neglect two of the major forces of injustice.
Ableism is at the root of all -isms.
“Ableism is what makes all other “isms” effective.
White supremacy is the goal, ableism is the toolkit.” (Imani Barbarin)
“…so much of what disability actually is, is just humanity; and so much of what ableism is, is a humanity heist.” “Ableism enables all forms of inequity and hampers all liberation efforts.” (Talila A. Lewis)
Disabled and neurodivergent people are always edge cases, and edge cases are stress cases.
We choose the margin, because design is tested at the edges.
“Living as we did on the edge we developed a particular way of seeing reality. We looked both from the outside in and from the inside out. We focused our attention on the centre as well as on the margin. We understood both.” (bell hooks)
“No one knows best the motion of the ocean than the fish that must fight the current to swim upstream.” “By focusing on the parts of the system that are most complex and where the people living it are the most vulnerable we understand the system best.” (Tressie McMillan Cottom)

I really like these ideas: Community is resistance. Asking for help. Showing up to give help. Collaboration.
I think if we’re going to have a future we need to embrace and act in these ideas. How would someone start if they are new to these ideas and new to community engagement?
Find people with which you share a concern or passion. You can do this via the pod mapping described above.
“Communities of Practice are groups of people who share a concern or passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.” (Wenger-Trayner, E. & Wenger-Trayner, B. 2015)
“Through free association, people will find those of mutual interests in every sphere of life to form groups on the basis of their affinity.” (Andrewism)
#ableism #accessIntimacy #accessibility #activistResearch #affinityGroups #art #behaviorism #biopsychosocial #care #cavendishSpace #community #competencyNetwork #constructionism #criticalWellness #directSupport #disabilityJustice #edgeCases #edges #education #epistemicInjustice #equity #forcedIntimacy #framing #identityFirst #interdependence #libraryEconomy #monotropism #mutualAid #mutuality #neuroqueerLearningSpaces #pathologyParadigm #peerRespite #podMapping #power #scientism #sharingSpoons #supportSwapping #warmLines #wellness
#wellness #warmlines #supportswapping #sharingspoons #scientism #power
Ryan Boren @[email protected] · 2022-01-28 · 10:59 UTC
Accommodations: Individualized Responses to Structural Design Problems
The accommodations for natural human variation should be mutual.
@laurenancona
Yet on a programmatic basis, disability policy and other social programs remain enmeshed, even at their best, in accommodation models, where specific proven needs or deficits generate specific individualized responses. What might it look like to shift our framing of the social safety net to a universal model?
I Shouldn’t Have to Dehumanize My Son to Get Him Support | The Nation
This captures an aspect of accommodation models that really frustrate us. They encourage individualized responses to structural design problems. Instead of designing by default for “proven needs” well-known in disability and neurodiversity communities, accommodations models require individual episodes of forced intimacy, repeated over and over and over for the rest of your life. We should treat each episode of forced intimacy as a stress case that puts our designs to the test of real life.
Embodied experience isn’t an edge case. It’s a blueprint.
What Sickle Cell Taught Me About Life & Systems! – YouTube

Our industry tends to call these edge cases-things that affect an insignificant number of users. But the term itself is telling, as information designer and programmer Evan Hensleigh puts it: “Edge cases define the boundaries of who and what you care about” (http://bkaprt.com/dfrl/00-01/). They demarcate the border between the people you’re willing to help and the ones you’re comfortable marginalizing.
That’s why we’ve chosen to look at these not as edge cases, but as stress cases: the moments that put our design and content choices to the test of real life.
It’s a test we haven’t passed yet. When faced with users in distress or crisis, too many of the experiences we build fall apart in ways large and small.
Design for Real Life

https://www.amazon.com/Design-Real-Life-Sara-Wachter-Boettcher/dp/1937557405

Instead of treating stress situations as fringe concerns, it’s time we move them to the center of our conversations-to start with our most vulnerable, distracted, and stressed-out users, and then work our way outward. The reasoning is simple: when we make things for people at their worst, they’ll work that much better when people are at their best.
Design for Real Life
School IEPs are a treasure trove of stress cases and structural problems currently treated individually. Let’s design for pluralism instead of putting us through a soul-chipping accommodations process that, at best, patches over bad design driven by “artificial economies of scarcity”.
Disability systems rely on artificial economies of scarcity. Programs are underfunded, so caregivers, teachers, social workers, and disabled people themselves are all pushed to project their needs as necessary and virtuous.
I Shouldn’t Have to Dehumanize My Son to Get Him Support
The many forms of difference. Adaptive Behavior Assessment (ABAS-3), Adult ADHD Self-report Scale (ASRS-v1.1), and Behavior Rating Inventory Executive Function (BRIEF 2) forms spread across a wooden table
What you can’t know unless you have #disability is how all the paperwork chips away at your soul. Every box you tick, every sentence about your “impairment” and “needs” becomes part of the narrative of your identity…
Gill Loomes-Quinn on Twitter
Bascom tells me that experiences like ours happen because disability service systems are never designed to support people with disabilities but are “about managing access to scarce resources. We start with the assumption that these resources are limited, so you have to prove over and over again that you need them more than anyone else. If we as a society invested more resources in supporting people with disabilities, we could redesign our systems accordingly.”
I Shouldn’t Have to Dehumanize My Son to Get Him Support | The Nation
Accessibility is a collective process! Invest in care, and design for real life. “The accommodations for natural human variation should be mutual.”
oh, there it is: neurodivergent people shouldn’t have to apply for ‘reasonable’ accommodations when the accommodations for natural human variation should be mutual
@laurenancona
The medical model is essentially individualist.
The prevalence of deficit-based thinking has the further consequence of focusing attention directly on the individual and away from social and environmental factors that might in fact play a significant role in shaping autistic lives (Engel, 1977).
Annual Research Review: Shifting from ‘normal science’ to neurodiversity in autism science

https://www.amazon.com/Inclusive-Education-Autistic-Children-Classroom/dp/1785923218

Terzi (2005, p.446), for example, is of the view that the medical model as played out in educational environments results in ‘perspectives emphasising individual limitations’ rather than the ways in which the organisation and design of schools might create those very difficulties in the first instance.
Wood, Rebecca. Inclusive Education for Autistic Children (p. 38). Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Kindle Edition.

Y’all know the file, right? This has been the thing that had been following me since I started special education. Those things are thick and deep. KGB got nothing on special ed.
The Gift: LD/ADHD Reframed
```
You have the right to food moneyProviding of course youDon't mind a littleInvestigation, humiliationAnd if you cross your fingersRehabilitationKnow your rightsThese are your rights-- Know Your Rights
```
https://youtu.be/M1Zz7QWbS-w

#accessibility #accommodation #care #design #designForRealLife #disability #forcedIntimacy #inclusion #stressCases #structuralIdeology
#accessibility #accommodation #care #design #designforreallife #disability
Ryan Boren @[email protected] · 2022-01-28 · 10:59 UTC
Accommodations: Individualized Responses to Structural Design Problems
The accommodations for natural human variation should be mutual.
@laurenancona
Yet on a programmatic basis, disability policy and other social programs remain enmeshed, even at their best, in accommodation models, where specific proven needs or deficits generate specific individualized responses. What might it look like to shift our framing of the social safety net to a universal model?
I Shouldn’t Have to Dehumanize My Son to Get Him Support | The Nation
This captures an aspect of accommodation models that really frustrate us. They encourage individualized responses to structural design problems.

Structural Redesign
We do not need more after-the-fact accommodations awkwardly bolted on exclusionary systems.
Inclusion Must Be Global, Decolonized, Culturally and Linguistically Diverse, and Anti-Normative
Systems built for the most complex communicators are not niche solutions—they are blueprints for broad accessibility, exposing what existing systems routinely ignore (Hamraie 2017). We do not need more after-the-fact accommodations awkwardly bolted on exclusionary systems. What is required is radical redesign: systems that begin at the margins and work inward, rather than centering an imagined “average” user (Costanza-Chock 2020; Srinivasan 2025a). This means building from the outset for people with intersecting sensory, motor, and communication needs, as well as for those excluded by language, geography, or normative assumptions (Peña 2019; Srinivasan 2025a; Bal et al. 2016)
This has not been a call for one-size-fits-all designs but for adaptive systems that are customizable, flexible, and co-created with the very communities they claim to include. Structural redesign is not about eliminating all accommodations, but embedding them so deeply that they become expected rather than exceptional. For the most marginalized, inclusion will not come from incremental adjustments but from radical solutions and systemic overhauls. It requires collective commitment to radical acceptance—to presuming competence, to trusting diverse ways of knowing and being, to valuing both independence and interdependence, and to designing environments that recognize all people as having dignity and deserving to belong. As disability justice movements have long shown, design that starts at the edges moves everyone forward (Berne 2015; Hamraie 2017; Pineda 2020).
Inclusion Must Be Global, Decolonized, Culturally and Linguistically Diverse, and Anti-Normative
Instead of designing by default for “proven needs” well-known in disability and neurodiversity communities, accommodations models require individual episodes of forced intimacy, repeated over and over and over for the rest of your life. We should treat each episode of forced intimacy as a stress case that puts our designs to the test of real life.

Edge Cases and Stress Cases
Embodied experience isn’t an edge case. It’s a blueprint.
What Sickle Cell Taught Me About Life & Systems! – YouTube

Our industry tends to call these edge cases-things that affect an insignificant number of users. But the term itself is telling, as information designer and programmer Evan Hensleigh puts it: “Edge cases define the boundaries of who and what you care about” (http://bkaprt.com/dfrl/00-01/). They demarcate the border between the people you’re willing to help and the ones you’re comfortable marginalizing.
That’s why we’ve chosen to look at these not as edge cases, but as stress cases: the moments that put our design and content choices to the test of real life.
It’s a test we haven’t passed yet. When faced with users in distress or crisis, too many of the experiences we build fall apart in ways large and small.
Design for Real Life

https://www.amazon.com/Design-Real-Life-Sara-Wachter-Boettcher/dp/1937557405

Instead of treating stress situations as fringe concerns, it’s time we move them to the center of our conversations-to start with our most vulnerable, distracted, and stressed-out users, and then work our way outward. The reasoning is simple: when we make things for people at their worst, they’ll work that much better when people are at their best.
Design for Real Life
School IEPs are a treasure trove of stress cases and structural problems currently treated individually. Let’s design for pluralism instead of putting us through a soul-chipping accommodations process that, at best, patches over bad design driven by “artificial economies of scarcity”.

Artificial Economies of Scarcity
Disability systems rely on artificial economies of scarcity. Programs are underfunded, so caregivers, teachers, social workers, and disabled people themselves are all pushed to project their needs as necessary and virtuous.
I Shouldn’t Have to Dehumanize My Son to Get Him Support
The many forms of difference. Adaptive Behavior Assessment (ABAS-3), Adult ADHD Self-report Scale (ASRS-v1.1), and Behavior Rating Inventory Executive Function (BRIEF 2) forms spread across a wooden table
What you can’t know unless you have #disability is how all the paperwork chips away at your soul. Every box you tick, every sentence about your “impairment” and “needs” becomes part of the narrative of your identity…
Gill Loomes-Quinn on Twitter
Bascom tells me that experiences like ours happen because disability service systems are never designed to support people with disabilities but are “about managing access to scarce resources. We start with the assumption that these resources are limited, so you have to prove over and over again that you need them more than anyone else. If we as a society invested more resources in supporting people with disabilities, we could redesign our systems accordingly.”
I Shouldn’t Have to Dehumanize My Son to Get Him Support | The Nation

The accommodations for natural human variation should be mutual.
Accessibility is a collective process! Invest in care, and design for real life. “The accommodations for natural human variation should be mutual.”
oh, there it is: neurodivergent people shouldn’t have to apply for ‘reasonable’ accommodations when the accommodations for natural human variation should be mutual
@laurenancona

The medical model is essentially individualist.
The medical model is essentially individualist.
The prevalence of deficit-based thinking has the further consequence of focusing attention directly on the individual and away from social and environmental factors that might in fact play a significant role in shaping autistic lives (Engel, 1977).
Annual Research Review: Shifting from ‘normal science’ to neurodiversity in autism science
Instead of designing for our undeniable interdependence and mutuality, we are suffocated by a medical model steeped in deficit model thinking.

https://www.amazon.com/Inclusive-Education-Autistic-Children-Classroom/dp/1785923218

Terzi (2005, p.446), for example, is of the view that the medical model as played out in educational environments results in ‘perspectives emphasising individual limitations’ rather than the ways in which the organisation and design of schools might create those very difficulties in the first instance.
Wood, Rebecca. Inclusive Education for Autistic Children (p. 38). Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Kindle Edition.

Investigation and Humiliation
Y’all know the file, right? This has been the thing that had been following me since I started special education. Those things are thick and deep. KGB got nothing on special ed.
The Gift: LD/ADHD Reframed
```
You have the right to food moneyProviding of course youDon't mind a littleInvestigation, humiliationAnd if you cross your fingersRehabilitationKnow your rightsThese are your rights-- Know Your Rights
```
https://youtu.be/M1Zz7QWbS-w

#accessibility #accommodation #care #design #designForRealLife #disability #forcedIntimacy #inclusion #stressCases #structuralIdeology
#structuralideology #stresscases #inclusion #forcedintimacy #disability #designforreallife