Reimagining Parenting Possibilities: Towards Intimate Justice

Abstract

At the heart of this paper is a collaboratively created script representing a line of analysis from the Reimagining Parenting Possibilities Project. The script is performed as a forum theatre scene used to disseminate findings from this ongoing research project. Forum theatre, an exemplar of Augusto Boal’s “theatre of the oppressed,” invites audience members into a scene, inventing through embodied performance and improvisation analyses and interventions in shared social dilemmas (Boal, 2006). The project rests upon our joint investments in exploring how the denial and containment of parenthood for people labeled with intellectual and developmental disabilities stems from enduring ableist views as to who is deemed “fit” to raise future citizens, and related efforts to erase disability. We introduce this work with a prologue – offering context for the ableist dynamic and intimate injustices that unfold in the scene. We also provide some background on how we developed the scene, attending to the democratizing and transformative potential of our methodology. Finally, by way of an epilogue, we sketch a number of questions about the scene’s potential to promote intimate and disability justice.