INTERCORPOREAL TOGETHERNESS: On Russian Blind Activists’ Technology of Disability Inclusion

Abstract

In this article, I analyze how inklyuziya activists and practitioners in Russia create contexts for “real inklyuziya” (nastoyashchaya inklyuziya, emic term). They do so by orchestrating engagements based on interactive corporeality, instead of circulating information about disability inclusion or mandating inclusivity at the organizational level. I conceptualize their chosen inklyuziya technology as intercorporeal togetherness—corporeally constituted responsiveness and reciprocity across the dis/ ability divide. I argue that disability exclusion, with ableism as its driver, is adopted corporeally in bodyminds. Bodyminds rarely, on their own, reorient toward disability inclusion, even when encouraging laws and protections are put in place. One way, though, to shift these bodyminds and align them with the ideals of inclusivity and antiableism is to employ the inklyuziya technology I call intercorporeal togetherness. By foregrounding bodyminds as forces and grounds of sociality, I point out that material and sensory anchors act as mechanisms of systemic exclusion and inclusion, thus contributing to anthropological scholarship on the making and breaking of the collective by sensory means. I show how they serve as platforms for exclusion’s continuous insidious and anonymized operation and, at the same time, how working with them opens up the potential to reconfigure sociality