Crip Intimacy, Crip Worldmaking
Crip Intimacy, Crip Worldmaking

Summary/Abstract: This essay examines the ways in which Adina Pintilie’s 2018 film Touch Me Not contains a critique of ableism or compulsory able-bodiedness. Placing the film in a larger, generative context of global disability culture, or crip worldmaking, the essay also provides a close reading of the role of disability activist Christian Bayerlein in it. The central figures in Touch Me Not, until the end, largely represent a discomfort with their own bodies and intimacy. Bayerlein, in contrast, explicitly rejects such discomfort and articulates a love for his own body and for sexuality that ultimately serves as a model for other figures in the film. The idea “you are another me” runs throughout Pintilie’s work, and this essay suggests that this phrase should be read in a way that affirms difference: you are another me but we are also different from each other, and the differences between us should be celebrated and might in fact be understood as pleasurable.

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