Unbreaking Our Hearts: Cultures of Un/Desirability and the Transformative Potential of Queercrip Porn

This dissertation combines critical disability studies, sexuality and porn studies, radical disability politics, interviews and the collaborative creation of queercrip porn to both explain and challenge the operation of cultures of undesirability in dominant culture. The concept "cultures of undesirability," describes the relations between systemic oppression and sexual marginalization: this dissertation documents the potential of queercrip porn to challenge and transform these relations. Through disability justice framework, we can imagine and enact disability not as pathological and unwanted, but as an opportunity to bring forth social organization that emphasizes connection, radical access, interdependency, and collectivity. In this dissertation I theorize porn as a multiple, embodied storytelling practice that contains the potential for disrupting and transforming cultures of undesirability. This dissertation also foregrounds the stories of the nine queercrip collaborators. Major themes to emerge in the research were in/visibility, shame, exclusion, and control. By enacting radical access, generating moments of access intimacy, and building community through practices of shared storytelling this research opens opportunities to push against the harm, erasure, and exclusion of cultures of undesirability. Queercrip porn, a strategic and intentional frame, is complex and always in motion. Centering the subjugated knowledges, experiences, and desires of queercrips, through the production of queercrip porn worlds disrupts dominant narratives, making room for complex personhood and messy and multiple ways of living and being. Also of significance to this work is the importance of community and imagining otherwise to the generation of cultures of resistance and resilience.