Ignagni - final - Dec 14 16


Correspondence Address: Esther Ignagni, School of Disability Studies, Ryerson University, 350 
Victoria St., Toronto, ON, M5B 2K3; Email: eignagni@ryerson.ca 

ISSN: 1911-4788 

Volume 10, Issue 2, 238-260, 2016 

Reimagining Parenting Possibilities: 
Towards Intimate Justice 

ESTHER IGNAGNI  
Ryerson University, Canada 

ANN FUDGE SCHORMANS 
McMaster University, Canada 

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. 

KEYWORDS  disability; parenthood; forum theatre; co-production; ableism 

Prologue 

There has been long, contested, and complicated legal debate over human 
rights to procreation and parenthood for disabled persons, relative to topics 
such as abortion, involuntary sterilization, marriage, and residency (Saxton, 
2013; Turner, 2006); of fundamental concern is the accessibility of 
parenthood possibilities. For disabled people, “right to parenthood” has been 
framed as a human right, and was formally enshrined in Article 23 of the UN 
Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) (UN, 2006). 



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Consonant with the general thrust of the CRPD, and responding to a violent 
history of the denial of parenthood rights (or perhaps more expansively, 
rights to building family), the Article seeks to protect negative freedoms by 
limiting state restrictions of disabled people’s freedom to marry, to enter 
relationships, to cohabitate, and to exercise reproductive choice and control 
(Anderson & Phillips, 2012; Shakespeare, 2014). The CRPD also sets out 
positive rights by requiring “active measures aimed at supporting and 
enabling (disabled) persons and their communities” to access the opportunity 
for intimate life, including parenthood (Anderson & Phillips, 2012, p. 1-2).  

For disabled people, possible aspirations towards parenthood have been 
systematically foreclosed – as evidenced by a eugenic history of state 
regulation of and intrusion into almost every area of their intimate lives, 
including their friendships, sexual expression, marriage, and reproductive 
choice and control (Kevles, 1985; Malacrida, 2015; McLaren, 2015). In 
Canada, segregated institutionalization, restrictive marriage laws, and forced 
sterilization were all part of a social policy response to the inaccurately 
assumed threat of inherited mental, physical, and moral deficiency 
(Dowbiggin, 1995; Malacrida, 2015).  Although traditional eugenic 
legislation has since been rescinded, its legacy continues to reverberate 
among disabled people in Canada and elsewhere through informal means and 
through newgenic legislation. Indeed, as some have argued, eugenics may 
have simply changed form, finding new expressions – newgenics – as it 
continues to interrupt and disqualify disabled people’s efforts and aspirations 
to create families of their choosing (Duster, 2003; Malacrida, 2015).1 One 
way this reverberation is felt is through the continued denial of disabled 
people’s positive rights and resources to pursue parenthood; increasingly 
inadequate support for families is seen, for example, in the insufficient of 
social housing, restricted childcare subsidies to parents who are not in paid 
employment, social assistance rates that maintain families in poverty, the loss 
of disability assistance for disabled parents upon marriage, the limited 
availability of accessible child and family-centric spaces (play centres, 
parent-child drop ins, daycares), limited accessible information on family and 
reproductive health, and so forth. While family forms and parenthood 
arrangements are undergoing profound social transformation (National 
Council on Disability, 2012), disabled people continue to be uncelebrated as 
parents, viewed as unacceptably transgressive, even when they attempt to 
approximate the most historically conventional family forms, let alone when 
they agentively elect to remain “child-free.” 

Underpinning the denial of disabled people’s intimate rights to parenthood 
are the ableist assumptions about who counts as a good citizen. Parenthood is 

																																																													
1 “Newgenics is a term that recognizes a broad range of medical, political and social practices 
related to ‘improving’ human kind on the one hand, and erasing disability and difference on the 
other. Newgenics moves beyond biological and medical interventions, to encompass systematic 
gaps and barriers to education, services, policy and supports for disabled people in terms of their 
sexuality and reproduction” (Eugenics to Newgenics, n.d., n.p.). 



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normatively a marker of adult citizenship (Plummer, 2003; Turner, 2006). 
While this does not mean that only those who parent are viewed as “adult 
citizens,” the many barriers to parenthood experienced by disabled people 
can be felt as a manifestation and a perverse justification of their continued 
infantilization. Further, according to feminist disability scholar Alison Kafer, 
disability is culturally threatening because it cannot easily align with the 
curative imaginary: “an understanding of disability that not only expects and 
demands intervention, but cannot imagine anything beyond this intervention” 
(2013, p. 27). Disabled lives at “the convergence of class, moralized gender 
and race locations” have been imagined as unlivable and granted no claim to 
shaping the future (Kafer, 2013, p. 27). This is particularly pronounced for 
people labeled with intellectual and developmental disabilities (from here 
forward referred to as “labeled people”). Since the figure of the child 
buttresses normative futures for the state and the human, disabled people are 
specifically barred from reproductive futurity. To do otherwise, would be to 
risk exposing the future child and thus all of our futures to disabled parents’ 
pathological nature and nurture (Kilkey & Clarke, 2010). 

At this point a definition of dis/ableism may be helpful. Ableism and 
disableism (dis/ableism) are not always familiar terms. Analogous to racism, 
sexism, or heterosexism, dis/ableism refers to “pervasive systems of 
discrimination and exclusion” (Campbell, 2001, p. 43), but impacts people 
with cognitive, emotional, sensory, and physical impairments or differences. 
Dis/ableism emanates from a “culturally embedded network of beliefs, 
processes and practices about the perfect, typical, fully human, bodily 
standards” (Campbell, 2001, p. 43). These are reflected in normative ideas 
about what constitutes health, productivity, beauty, intelligence, and 
competence, against which disabled, Mad, Deaf, and labeled people are 
understood to be “diminished humans” (Campbell, 2001, p.43). By 
dehumanizing and devaluing disabled people, these beliefs fuel the restriction 
and containment of disabled people’s activity and the “socially embedded and 
engendered ways” in which we undermine their physical and emotional 
wellbeing (Thomas, 2007, p. 73; Goodley, 2014). To summarize, disabled 
people’s imputed failure to meet cognitive, social, and physical ideals means 
they are actively disqualified from parenting (through sterilization, lack of 
sexual health education, denial of opportunities for intimacy, child 
apprehension, etc.). Eugenic ideals of a good birth, proper home, ideal 
family, and proper parenting continue to surface in contemporary 
assessments of who is or isn’t fit to be a citizen and to produce future 
citizens.  
 
 
Background of the Project 
 
Reimagining Parenting Possibilities (RPP) grew out of the work of the 
community organization Strength-Based Parenting Initiative (SPIN). SPIN is 



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a user-led provincial network (Ontario, Canada), created and operated by and 
for parents and prospective parents with disabilities. SPIN provides education 
and advocacy around experiences and concerns related to parenting and 
disability. Committed to inclusion, equity, affordability, and justice around 
parenting resources, SPIN operates from anti-oppression and anti-ableism 
philosophies as it strives to re-imagine parenting and family life for all 
disabled, Mad, Deaf, and labeled people. 

In its work, the group has repeatedly confronted how people labeled with 
intellectual and developmental disabilities are acutely marginalized with 
respect to parenting and parenthood. It was these observations that led to the 
establishment of RPP, an Ontario-wide, community-based, participatory 
research initiative. Using a co-researcher model, the project attempts to 
privilege the voices of labeled people. We begin with the experience of 
disability to re-imagine what we think of as parenting, family, intimacy, and 
reproductive justice in non-normative and inclusive ways. 

We acknowledge the ways in which “intellectual and developmental 
disability” and “parenting/parenthood” are culturally constructed and 
socially, economically, and politically mediated. Thus, in this project we (as a 
research team) are trying to move beyond a phenomenological account 
towards a critical interpretation. Our project is not framed as therapeutic, but 
as a means of taking part in the ongoing debates about intellectual and 
developmental disability and parenting/parenthood in the cultural realm.  
 
 
The Co-Researcher Teams 

 
One of our first tasks in the project was to establish a core group of six self-
advocate co-researchers – RPP co-researchers – who have been working 
alongside academic and community team members on all aspects of the 
project (for instance, in developing interview guides, training other co-
researchers, conducting interviews and data analysis, and disseminating 
findings).2 In addition to the core group, groups of three or four self-advocate 
co-researchers in five other communities across Ontario were put into place 
to implement the project in their region. Working with local facilitators, they 
interviewed service providers and policy makers in order to develop a sense 
of the resource context in their region. Significantly, they also interviewed 
labeled people about their parenting experiences, aspirations, and 
disappointments. 
 
 
 
 

																																																													
2 Self-advocate refers to a labeled person who advocates for social and political change to 
improve the life conditions for disabled people and themself. 



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Our Methodology 
 
At the direction of the co-researchers we decided to use forum theatre both as 
a form of analysis and as a means of knowledge and story sharing. 

Forum theatre is based on Augusto Boal’s (1995, 2002) “theatre of the 
oppressed” framework for popular education and social change. Boal 
describes this framework as follows:  

 
a system of physical exercises, aesthetic games, image techniques and special 
improvisations whose goal is to safeguard, develop and reshape this human 
vocation, by turning the practice of theatre into an effective tool for the 
comprehension of social and personal problems and the search for their solutions. 
(Boal, 1995, pp. 14-15) 
 
Forum theatre, itself, is intended to generate collaborative and critical 

dialogue among the audience members. Scenes about a social or political 
situation are created and presented to audiences.  Actors’ and audience 
members’ roles are interchangeable – audience members can join the scene 
and are invited to stop the action and suggest alternative actions that will lead 
to more desirable results. These spect-actors (Boal, 2002) thus become active 
transformers of the scene.  

Consistent with Boal’s work, in our use of forum theatre, the scenes are not 
intended to culminate in a single solution or play out to a single “correct” 
conclusion. Instead, the involvement of audience members may generate 
multiple possibilities or follow different trajectories. Thus, we hope that 
audience members and we, as researchers, might “become more conscious of 
the other person’s possibilities” (Taussig, Schechner, & Boal, 1990, p. 62). 
 
 
Creating the Scene 
 
We derived our forum theatre scenes through a process of collaborative 
analysis. We began by working in small groups of academic, community, and 
self-advocate co-researchers. We read interview transcripts together, making 
note of what seemed important, what questions were generated for us, and 
what we thought was “going on” in the interviews. After we had worked 
through about ten interviews, we paused to take stock of our salient learning 
to that point. Among the most compelling revelations were the institutional 
and family responses to labeled people considering parenthood. Team 
members were particularly moved by the responses to expectant parents. 
Focusing on these, we spent considerable time thinking and talking about the 
key responses labeled people received with respect to parenting – the 
underlying assumptions, motivations, content, tone, and individual and 
collective effects of these responses on labeled people.  

At that point, the academic researchers (Ignagni and Fudge Schormans) 
returned to the transcripts to identify various excerpts that exemplified the 



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responses. These were compiled and reviewed again by the larger team. 
Then, working with a few interviews, we began to devise our scenes. 
Through brainstorming and considering our own experiences with families, 
co-researchers settled on dinner scenes with family and friends, and from that 
point began to improvise and work the situations until we had four loosely 
scripted scenes. 

Returning to the transcripts, academic team members re-worked the scripts 
again to integrate exemplary and analytically significant participant 
quotations into the scenes, checking with the larger research team to make 
sure they fit with team members’ initial analyses and ideas. Throughout the 
process we tried to make the narratives presented in individual participant 
interviews more complex, weaving in other responses as much as possible. 
Our objective was to develop scenes that would render visible and juxtapose 
subjugated, dominant, dis/ableist, resistant, and other perspectives. The 
questions raised in the scenes deal with value and ethics (professional and 
societal), and with power and privilege. Our hope is that through repeated 
workshopping of these and other scenes, we can reveal many other 
experiences and meanings of intellectual and developmental disability, 
parenting/parenthood, and intimate life. Below we present the script for one 
scene. 

 
 
Making Lemonade 
  
By: Christine Austin, Joanna Drassinower, Kareem Elbard, Rainbow Hunt, 
Ashley Judge, Renee Morin, Romeo Pierre, Tania Jivraj, Kate Peters, Sarah 
Wren. 
 
Characters: Narrator; Mary; Tyrone; Christine Johnson; Joe Johnson; Gladys 
(the social worker); Father Murphy (the priest); Uncle Bob; Aunt Sarah 
 
Seating Arrangement: 

 
 



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Narrator: Hello, I am part of the Reimagining Parenting Possibilities Self-
Advocate Parenting Working Group. I’ll be your narrator for this afternoon. 
We’re going to present a four act play. We ask that you save your questions 
until the end. 

In our first act, we will be joining the Johnsons for dinner. Let me 
introduce you to the family. Here at the head of the table is Joe Johnson – the 
family patriarch. At the other end of the table is his wife Christine Johnson. 
Among the friends and family present there are a couple people we should 
pay attention to. 

This is Father Murphy, the local priest. Here’s Uncle Bob – he’s never 
really fit into the family. Here’s his partner Aunt Sarah, she has a heart of 
gold. And here is Gladys, the neighbor. She just happens to be a worker at 
Children’s Aid. 

And finally, here’s Tyrone and Mary – both of whom have been labeled 
with developmental disabilities. Mary is Joe and Christine’s daughter and 
Tyrone is her current boyfriend. They have a big announcement to make! 
 
(Everybody fusses and makes comments about how good the roast beef was. 
People around the table are all talking to each other. Mary and Tyrone are 
sitting close together and whispering to each other – they are nervous and 
excited.) 
 
Mary: (clinks her glass, excitedly) Excuse me, excuse me. 
 
Christine: Everybody, Mary is trying to get our attention. 
 
Mary: Thanks Mom. Everybody, Tyrone and I have something we’d like to 
share with you. 
 
Christine: Which is? 
 
Mary: (very happy) Tyrone and I are having a baby. I’m six weeks pregnant! 
 
(A collective gasp from everyone except Tyrone) 
 
Dad: You are???!!! 
 
Christine: Oh my god! What are we going to do now?! We have to fix this 
somehow! 
 
Gladys:  (calmly) Well, Christine, Joe, don’t worry. There’s lots we can do to 
help out. 
 
Dad: Like what? 
 



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Gladys: Well, these two (pointing to Mary and Tyrone, speaking 
sarcastically) can come down to the office and they can complete some 
paperwork. We have a lot of forms for them to fill out. Then at a later date, 
you and Christine can come and fill out some forms. Then one of my 
colleagues can come here for a home visit and you can fill out some more 
forms. Now if you all come to these meetings and fill out the correct forms, 
we can be finished by the time the baby is about 4 years old. 
 
Christine: (talking to Mary and Tyrone, speaking angrily) Hold on a minute! 
You two think you’re going to be parents? There’s part of me that wants to 
say you made your bed, you sleep in it. 
 
Mary: We’re prepared to take on that responsibility. We want to raise this 
child just like you raised me. We’re excited about being a family. 
 
Dad: Well that’s great, that’s what we would want you to do… but that’s not 
very realistic. 
 
Christine: Oh my, this is all such a shock! 
 
Uncle Bob: (gruffly) Oh calm down Christine. It’s still early. The girl said it 
was only six weeks along. She could (whispering) terminate. You know get 
rid…. 
 
Mary: (upset) But I don’t want to! 
 
The priest: (interrupting, indignant) Excuse me; the Johnson’s are an 
upstanding Catholic family. Their faith forbids them from taking a life! A 
life, even at six weeks, is a life. If the Johnson’s had those kinds of values, 
Mary would not be with us today. 
 
Mary: I really want to have this baby…. 
 
Tyrone: Mr. and Mrs. Johnson, since we’re having this baby, I would like to 
ask for Mary’s hand in marriage. (takes Mary’s hand and speaks lovingly) 
 
(silence) 
 
Dad: Well young man, Mary’s mother and I will have to think about that! 
 
Christine: Yes, at this point, I can see us helping Mary raise the baby. But 
you Tyrone…… 
 



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The priest: I’m not sure I can actually marry you both Tyrone. Marriage is a 
sacrament. I can only marry people who understand the sacred bond they’re 
about to enter.   
 
Gladys: And you’re getting way ahead of yourself Tyrone. Of course you 
might be able to have supervised visits with the child, but just because you 
are the biological father, doesn’t mean Children’s Aid will think you can be 
an active parent to this child. In fact, before either of you can seriously think 
about parenting this child, you will need to have a parenting capacity 
assessment and a risk assessment. And I’m not at all sure about the 
outcome…. 
 
Aunt Sarah: (to Gladys) So are you suggesting that we bring them into 
Children’s Aid. I’ve known these two for a long time – they wouldn’t 
intentionally hurt a child! 
 
Gladys: Not intentionally… 
 
Tyrone: (upset) But why should I have supervised visits? It’s our kid. We 
created a baby out of our love. And we will love this child – not hurt it. 
 
Uncle Bob: (interrupting) But really, do you think those two can do it. (To 
Tyrone) Do you two have jobs? 
 
Mary: Well we have part-time jobs. They are supported employment but we 
do have jobs! Tyrone and I love each other and we have so much love to give 
this baby! 
 
Uncle Bob: Do you make enough money to live on? 
 
Mary: Well, we do get ODSP.3 It’s not a lot. But we want to raise our child 
just like mom and dad did…. 
 
Uncle Bob: Well, do you have a place to live? 
 
Tyrone: Well, yes. We live in a nice assisted living building. It’s a SIL.4   
 
Uncle Bob: Can you raise a family there? 
 
Tyrone: (shakes his head) 
 

																																																													
3 ODSP (Ontario Disability Support Program) is an income transfer program aimed at people 
with disabilities in the province of Ontario, Canada. 
4 SIL (Supported Independent Living).	



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Narrator: Tyrone is feeling like he has been shut out of this family and out 
of his baby’s life. 
 
Mary: Well, no, I don’t think so… but Mom and Dad, Tyrone and I want to 
learn how to support this child, just like you raised me. 
 
Uncle Bob: Do you know how to change a diaper? 
 
Dad: Do you know how to take care of a colicky baby? 
 
The priest: Do you know how to soothe a teething baby? 
 
Aunt Sarah: Do you know what to do if the baby cries all night? 
 
Mary: (pleading) I promise, we’ll take parenting classes. We can…. 
 
Christine: Well, somebody has to take control of this mistake. Don’t you 
agree Joe? 
 
Aunt Sarah: But listen, you both will get more ODSP if you have a baby, 
right? I heard that you can get nursery furniture, a stroller, extra money for 
diapers and formula. Maybe an agency like Children’s Aid can help with 
extra support?  
 
Gladys: (sarcastically) Oh yeah, Mary has hit the jackpot! No seriously, the 
ODSP increase is minimal. And the agency is concerned with getting families 
to raise their children independently.  
 
Joe: (to Christine) Oh, yeah. It took two of them to do it, but I think at this 
point, you and I will need to take over. They don’t have the finances, they 
don’t have a house… 
 
Narrator: Tyrone and Mary understand that they will have no say in their 
baby’s life. They start moving away from the table, crying and holding each 
other for comfort. 
 
(Here Tyrone and Mary start moving back, away from the table and the rest 
of the family. They are holding each other and clearly upset.) 
 
Aunt Sarah: Well, maybe that’s the answer. Maybe, Joe and Christine, you 
can raise the baby. It pains me to think of that little bairn alone in the world. 
You always wanted a second child. 
 



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The priest: With your faith, the way you value life. You see every child as a 
blessing – how wonderful that you might consider raising this child in this 
faithful home. 
 
Gladys: And you’re so well resourced as a family. And you are still young 
enough to raise your grandchild. 
 
The priest: What a lucky child this will be! 
 
Christine: I’m feeling a little better about this. Joe, what colour should we 
paint the bedroom? 
 
Joe: I should go out to the garage and see if we have anything stored away 
from when Mary was young. Maybe this one will be a boy. I could teach him 
woodworking. 
 
Aunt Sarah: Oh, I can start my knitting again – I love making booties. 
 
Uncle Bob: This family amazes me in the way it can make lemonade out of 
any lemon of a situation! 
 
The End 
 
At this point, the narrator goes around the table and asks each character 
what they want. While responses are not tightly scripted they generally reflect 
the following sentiments: 
 
Joe: I just want to play golf. 
 
Father Murphy: I want morality to prevail – and it has. 
 
Uncle Bob: I want people around this table to be sensible! Let’s be realistic, 
they can’t parent a child. 
 
Aunt Sarah: I just want everyone to get along. 
 
Gladys: I’m so close to retirement; I just want this situation to get resolved 
without too much work or complication. 
 
Christine: I want to make sure my new little grandchild is safe. 
 
Tyrone: I want to be part of my child’s life. 
 
Mary: I want to raise my baby with Tyrone and I want my family to support 
my decision! 



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The narrator then opens conversation to the audience, asking them what they 
think of the outcome, what feelings and thoughts it raises for them, and how 
they think the dynamic might have played out differently. After some 
discussion, audience members are invited to become spect-actors and the 
scene is re-enacted with audience members moving in and out of the action. 
 
 
Epilogue 
 
To date, Making Lemonade has been presented 16 times, with plans to 
integrate it and other scenes into more structured educational workshops. 
Well-received by most audiences, we are struck by some of the ways its 
performance both opens up and precludes the possibilities for re-imagining 
parenting and intimate justice for labeled people. Below we introduce some 
emerging questions. 
 
 
How Do We Reach Different Audiences?  
 
Our audiences have, for the most part, been comprised of academics and 
students (from various disciplines including social work, disability studies, 
midwifery, history, law, philosophy, and gender studies), although we have 
had several opportunities to reach out to general communities. Initially, our 
audiences reflected our desires to elicit feedback on our research 
methodology and its potential for knowledge mobilization and exchange. 
Working with university-based audiences also allows us to reach future 
practitioners directly and indirectly through those currently in positions to 
challenge dis/ableist discourse within curriculum, research, and policy 
consultation.   

We have been only moderately successful in reaching practitioner 
audiences, especially child welfare workers. This matters because many of 
our participants’ stories recounted hurtful experiences with child welfare, 
including child apprehension. Many child welfare social workers are trained 
and committed to an anti-oppression analysis, but this does not always extend 
to disability, which tends to be viewed as a clinical matter. Thus our work, 
which positions disability as a social construct, may not be viewed as relevant 
to or consistent with child welfare values. In fact, if disability is viewed as 
“naturally” contributing to the risk of child neglect and maltreatment, as an 
understandable source of parental or caregiver stress, the conflict and 
oppression within the scene may not be recognized.  

More significantly, we are less able to access labeled people. While labeled 
people have been in our audiences, their numbers have been low. This 
difficulty speaks to the extent to which labeled people’s lives remain heavily 
monitored and contained. Given the very high number labeled interviewees in 
the larger project  who told us they had never previously voiced their parental 



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desires, our hope is that these scenes can serve as a vehicle to begin such 
conversations. We also hope that theatre workshops can become a place to 
share practical resources to help labeled people realize their parenting 
dreams. We continue to struggle with how to reach labeled people. 
 
 
What Sorts of Narrative Interventions Emerge? 
 
Many audiences remark that Making Lemonade is the first time they have 
witnessed labeled people in a position of providing expert and legitimated 
knowledge. Some go as far as to admit that the workshops are the first time 
they have met a labeled person. Among those who work directly to support 
families, the scenes provided a sobering insight into the disabling and 
demeaning responses received by labeled prospective parents. The ways in 
which dis/ableism is systemically embedded are illuminated for audiences 
through the characters of Father Murphy and Gladys, the social worker. By 
entering the scene, some audience members begin to think about how to resist 
and transform the system. For instance, the priest is often the first character to 
be replaced by a spect-actor, his dialogue transformed to celebrate the 
disabled couple’s right to and desire for loving commitment. Audiences seem 
to trouble the priest’s moral authority, by removing scripted moral 
pronouncements and replacing them with words of comfort and validation. In 
other instances, audience members are quick to invent new characters, such 
as lawyers, who would help Mary and Tyrone claim their parental and 
intimate rights – creating a systemic enhancement of sorts. Audiences also 
clearly worried about interpersonal dis/ableism, crystallized in the silencing 
and spatial distancing of both expectant parents. Spect-actors took on the role 
of kindly Aunt Sarah to offer assistance instead of recrimination. Indeed, 
spect-actors challenged other characters (for example, Uncle Bob) on their 
“bullying” and “close-mindedness.” 

Other audience interventions have been less transformative. We focus on 
three consistent responses here: default to dominant models of disability, 
magical thinking, and the reiteration of competence.  

Audiences’ possibilities for Mary and Tyrone often follow one of the major 
models of disability: charity or rights. Of the pair, the charitable responses to 
disability emerge more readily. Audience members eagerly offer to lend a 
hand – offering advice, time, a basement apartment, a call to the congregation 
to donate money and baby gear – offers of assistance that rarely emerged 
from Mary and Tyrone’s expressed concerns or wants. We suspect these 
responses are well-intended efforts to care and show support for the young 
couple. Rarely however, do audiences account for how these offers are ad 
hoc and contingent on the benefactor’s resources and immediate priorities. 
We are grappling with how audiences could be supported to explore the 
possibility that these offers are extended on the assumption that Mary and 
Tyrone will ultimately enact some form of normative parenthood. Equally 



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troubling, audience members never consider the thresholds to their own 
“giving” – what they need or expect in exchange for their goodwill. 

A challenge for us is to help audiences consider these questions and to 
reflect on the impact of charitable responses to disabled people. The charity 
model positions disabled people as dependent: passive recipients of others’ 
beneficence. Disability is understood as an individual misfortune, which 
underpins and explains all the troubles experienced by the disabled person. 
What is called for in the charity model is a gesture of assistance directed at 
the individual, rather than any broader social enhancement to redress 
exclusions from or deterrents to parenthood (Stiker, 1999; Longmore & 
Umansky, 2001). 

Audiences may not be conscious of this broader framing of their 
interventions in the scene. In times of government social spending restraint, 
communities, families, and individuals are called upon to assume care for one 
another. We are enjoined to form strong social bonds and collective care to 
prevent vulnerable others from slipping through an unraveling social safety 
net. Thus, the impulse to informally share individual resources comes in part 
from a practical appraisal of Mary and Tyrone’s precarious material 
conditions (no job, low income, inadequate housing). This impulse might be 
fueled by a sense of active citizenship (commitment to taking responsibility 
for one’s family/neighbours/community through civic engagement and 
participation), or conversely, by a disability commons (a sphere of reciprocity 
and mutual support outside of and contra the market) (e.g., Runswick-Cole & 
Goodley, 2015). Our task within workshops is to prompt audiences to note 
and guard against slippage between these two positions, keeping the 
structural forces shaping family making in mind.  

Charitable interventions have an enduring impact on labeled people’s lives. 
While doing little to change their social and material life conditions, charity 
responses tell labeled people that they are objects of sympathy and pity. 
Labeled people may, and often do, internalize these messages, eroding their 
sense of worthiness and capacity to care for others. Charitable responses can 
be understood and felt as dis/ableist micro-aggressions, fueling psycho-
emotional distress (Campbell & Oliver, 2013; Reeve, 2006). Because many 
disabled people’s access to helpful resources and community integration is so 
precarious, many feel they cannot draw attention to the violent dimensions of 
charity. Instead they find themselves assuming a posture of deference and 
gratitude that keep them locked in as needy subjects. 

In sharp contrast to the charitable model of disability, audiences sometimes 
evoke rights models of disability. This too takes different routes – sometimes 
as appeals to intimate human rights as articulated in the CRPD. At other 
times, audiences are calling for social rights; the state supported services 
afforded to citizens of the Global North’s (former) welfare states. Disability 
rights have had an undeniably helpful impact on many disabled people, 
leading to more meaningful integration to work, education, and community 
life (Shakespeare, 2014). Rights have helped to spell out a minimum standard 



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of treatment and promises of freedom from harm (Ignatieff, 2008). However, 
rights approaches have recently been criticized for creating new social 
divisions (Kafer, 2013; Mingus, 2011). 

Rights interventions depend on a pre-given knowledge of entitlements. Yet 
as our research findings indicate, many labeled people do not have access to 
rights information. When such information is at hand it is not always in an 
accessible format. As such, when spect-actors bring in rights-based 
interventions we must stop the scene to provide a clear explanation of these 
rights in order for labeled people to keep pace with what is being proposed. 

Other times, it is audiences themselves who raise questions about rights 
approaches. Audience members whose identities and histories are not tied to 
privileged Western nations, question the continued turn to the state, querying 
how intimate rights can be pursued in the context of serious material 
deprivation or failed governments (Ignagni, Fudge Schormans, Liddiard, & 
Runswick-Cole, 2016). Even among North American and European 
audiences, social rights such as education, social assistance, or healthcare, 
might be understood as precarious. For instance, under conditions of austerity 
social policy, such as in the United Kingdom, disabled people have been 
among the hardest hit, subject to a host of benefit clawbacks (Runswick-Cole 
& Goodley, 2015). And while our human rights, as represented in the CRPD, 
are meant to help resist the erosion of hard-won entitlements, the social 
infrastructure enabling these claims has been dismantled and defunded (see, 
for example, the removal of the Canadian federal Charter Challenges 
program in 2006). Still more unsettling were the responses of Aboriginal 
participants and audience members who did not necessarily see themselves as 
rights-bearing Canadian “citizens,” but as being in treaty relationships with 
the Canadian state; they were frustrated in their attempts to join in such 
alternate imaginings. Deepening their sense of disengagement was their 
understanding of disability as a colonialist category on par with gender (see 
also Evans, Hole, Berg, Hutchinson, & Sookraj, 2009). While our thoughts 
about these interactions and responses are evolving, we wonder about the 
new exclusions that might be created by these ostensibly empowering 
interventions.  

Marta Russell, late disability activist and scholar, argued that the majority 
of those who have benefitted from rights victories have been middle-class 
and otherwise privileged. Consequently, the existing rights frameworks do 
not reflect the life circumstances of the majority of disabled people (Russell, 
1999). How can the complicated and contradictory dimensions of the 
ostensibly emancipatory promise of rights be surfaced with audiences? How 
can we teach audience members about disability rights, even as we articulate 
their limitations and normative underpinnings?  

A second set of questions emerges when the scene’s narrative plays out 
along a magical vein. Boal describes magical thinking as the moment 
audience members move the action of the scene from reality to “the realms of 
magic or fantasy” (2002, p. 37).  Perhaps the clearest instances of this were 



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audience members’ efforts to convince others around the table that Mary and 
Tyrone could raise their child independently. This is not in itself fantastical, 
but the dialogue in these interventions seems to inevitably slip into playful 
pronouncements; the audience introduces romantic ideas about Tyrone’s 
impending debut as a hip-hop artist, for example. To contextualize this 
imaginative turn, it is crucial to know that Tyrone was portrayed by a Black 
self-advocate (who chose the name Tyrone for the character). Although 
project self-advocates have found recent news reports about a young labeled 
father who embarked upon a rap music career, we have all agreed that the 
scene would not practically play out along these desirable lines. Moreover, 
the intervention evokes black culture in ways that seem to narrow the 
possible avenues to paid work and “success” to options that can only be 
accomplished by a very privileged few. 

Another less whimsical example of magical thinking occurs when spect-
actors, in taking on the Gladys role, and abandon all the concomitant 
responsibilities of a child welfare worker. The new Gladys offers 
unconditional, compassionate support, much like those audience members 
enacting the charity model of disability. Often, one of the research team 
actors must challenge this intervention, noting that no child welfare worker 
could work in this manner, due to state-based professional practice 
regulations and resource realities. We try to work together to imagine how 
Gladys might support the Johnson family, especially Mary and Tyrone, 
within the constraints of her position. We appreciate the audiences’ attempts 
to hold onto dreams that offer more hope for justice than the inadequate 
solutions we have at hand. At the same time, we continue nudging audiences 
towards more reflexive positions that unpack the interpersonal and structural 
dis/ableisms shaping the dinner table interactions. 

Finally, we have noted that many interventions try to inculcate and assert 
Mary and Tyrone’s ability to competently parent their future child. 
Sometimes this looks like skills training – offers of classes and mentoring to 
help Mary and Tyrone acquire and perfect the essential tasks of parenting. 
Other times, the interventions are more general, focusing on their (imagined) 
alternate areas of competence (e.g., emotional intelligence). In every 
presentation of the scene, a non-labeled parent in the audience will share their 
own knowledge gaps with the birth of their first child. Audiences suggest that 
“no one knows what to do” when it comes to parenting a first child, but imply 
that parenting knowledge is there for the taking. The assumption is that, like 
non-labeled first time parents, Mary and Tyrone can become “competent 
subjects” and competent parents. 

This turn toward the issue of competence troubles the intersection of 
parenthood and intellectual and developmental disability. As with other 
interventions, education or knowledge acquisition serve to individualize the 
parenting problems faced by Mary and Tyrone in the scene. The approach 
assumes that their problem lies in a knowledge and skills deficit. Presumably 
this deficit can be overcome by submitting the pair to new forms of adult 



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education, despite the fact that many labeled people experience education and 
training as arenas of extreme disempowerment (Erevelles, 2005; Watts & 
Erevelles, 2004). When the scene begins to play out along these lines, we 
wonder how to avoid reiterating the very ground upon which labeled people 
are marginalized. Then our challenge in the scenes is to prompt audiences to 
consider why labeled people have lacked the opportunities to develop 
parenting knowledges and practical skills in the first place. How can we 
reveal the normative demands connected with any discrete body of parenting 
knowledge? How can we begin to de-link human value from notions of 
competence? How might audiences be inspired to think about alternatives to 
competence? 
 
 
Ethical Dilemmas of Performance 
 
In the prologue of this paper, we cited Alison Kafer’s observation that those 
marked “feebleminded” were located “at the convergence of race, moralized 
gender, class and disability” (2013, p.27). As RPP members, many of us – 
like many of our participants – live at those intersections, and wove them into 
the script when we could. Thus, Mary and Tyrone reflect the embodied and 
biographical experiences of several co-researchers and interview participants. 
In other scenes, Aboriginal and queer identities are reflected in the characters 
and their dialogue. Very specific experiences, such as inducements to 
voluntary sterilization; the push for termination of pregnancy; the denial, 
interruption, and discrediting of intimate relationships; and the separation 
from children are also reflected in the dynamics that play out in the different 
scenes. 

Given that the dinner table scene involves nine characters, we have 
sometimes found that we did not have enough actors to occupy the available 
roles. Early on, we decided to invite audience members to take on a scripted 
role. Volunteers are quickly apprised of the character’s attitude, motivations, 
and wants in the scene. This has meant that a volunteer actor may embody a 
character that has little bearing on their personal experience, raising some 
ethical questions. For instance, there is always a risk of enacting a sort of 
“cripface” with the problems that flow from non-disabled actors taking on the 
role of a disabled character (Harris, 2014). Our aesthetic goals for our scenes 
are, in practice, modest, but we do aim for actors to attempt to convey 
disability in ways that do not reproduce shallow stereotypes. More 
significantly, when labeled people represent themselves in the scene they 
powerfully challenge their dis/ableist characterization as voiceless, 
incompetent, and incomplete persons. Inevitably, there are fewer 
opportunities for this when labeled people are not in the scene in some 
substantial way – particularly when portraying a labeled character.  

In a related vein, we have struggled with cross-racial 
representations. Tyrone is a character who appears in several scenes, always 



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as an expectant father. In each case, non-disabled characters are skeptical 
about his suitability for fatherhood, assuming that his intimate, parental 
motivations are rooted in sexist exploitation and are an expression of 
hegemonic masculine sexual prowess. These dynamics reflect a strong racist 
and ableist discourse about labeled men’s illegitimate paternal subjectivities, 
and were encountered across service provider and participant interviews. 
Racialized co-researchers identified the discourse immediately from 
transcripts and were eager to integrate it into scripts, remarking that it “felt 
real,” while also critically acknowledging its power to constrain parenthood 
for all racialized men.  

Audiences’ response to Tyrone’s role within scenes depends upon the 
actor. As noted above, typically Tyrone has been played by a Black co-
researcher. Audiences generally responded warmly to him, inviting him to 
take a more active role with his current partner and asserting his capacity to 
be a “good father.” Working with his stated desire to be part of his child’s 
life, they repeatedly sought to bring him into the family fold. When we 
performed more than one scene in which Tyrone appeared, audiences 
speculated that his efforts to “settle down” must have been impeded by 
others. Without variation, audiences bestowed a type of “respectability” upon 
Tyrone’s intentions and actions.  

In the rare instance when the regular co-researcher has not been able to 
perform this role, non-racialized volunteers have been substituted. These 
instances have always provoked the audience into a more critical stance – 
calling out the research teams for engaging in such racist stereotypes. 
Specifically, we are asked why we chose a name associated with Black 
identity for the young father. Rather than being viewed as an effort to de-
centre the whiteness of families, citizenship, and fatherhood through active 
engagement with oppressive discourses, the scene is understood as 
promulgating those very discourses. Ultimately, audiences recognize that 
racism intersects with disability and gender in the scene, although not 
necessarily recognizing that it also intersects in the lives of labeled people. 

These different audience responses feel unsurprising, but deserve further 
interrogation. We wonder if Tyrone’s portrayal by a Black co-researcher 
somehow naturalizes the racist/ableist/gendered representation of masculinity 
and fatherhood. While audiences do try to redress Tyrone’s exclusion from 
his future child’s life, they privilege a monogamous, involved fatherhood. We 
are currently working with audiences to consider how Tyrone might be able 
to sustain multiple connections with children and (former) partners without 
deferring to typical constructions of the “good father.” We wonder about how 
to move audiences to reflect on the power relations involved in remaining 
silent when Tyrone is played by a Black actor. 

In a variation, we notice that Mary’s mother Christine, almost always 
played by a co-researcher, is almost never replaced or assertively challenged 
despite her negative responses to the news of Mary’s pregnancy. We wonder 
if this is an attempt at political correctness. For instance, as a mother of a 



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disabled young person, the character of Christine Johnson may be viewed as 
engaging in greater and more arduous caring labour than do other family 
members and mothers of non-disabled children. Perhaps audiences can 
sympathize with her distress about supporting her daughter through a 
pregnancy. Perhaps they think that to critique her is to de-legitimate the 
intense caring labour she presumably performs. Complicating this is the fact 
that Christine Johnson has, to date, always been played by a co-researcher 
who also uses a wheelchair. Typically, audiences greet the replacement of 
“mean” characters by “spect-actors” with cheers, laughter, and applause. 
With rare exceptions, the mean characters are portrayed by non-disabled 
actors. Perhaps audiences are disinclined to put co-researchers through this 
experience of being replaced. In a sense this reflects a larger finding from our 
research. In the overall study we found that non-disabled practitioners were 
reluctant to articulate the terms “intellectual disability/developmental 
disability/impairment” for fear of causing offence (Ignagni & Schormans, 
2016). Other times, we worry audiences are responding with a sort of 
disableism toward this co-researcher, enacting the assumption that she may 
not appreciate that her words and responses were offensive. That said, 
Christine Johnson was one of the least empowered characters around the 
dinner table – caught in webs of patriarchal and institutional power along 
with Mary and Tyrone. Replacing her may have made little difference to the 
overall trajectory of the scene. 

Finally, we are currently grappling with the ethics involved in asking 
people to repeatedly embody dis/ableist violence in the scenes. This is as true 
for the co-researcher who is performing a parent’s distress at losing custody 
of her child, as it is for the co-researcher voicing ableist, sexist, and racist 
slurs. How do we care for one another within and after each performance? 
And, going further, who might be precluded from embodying these characters 
because of their performative and rhetorical violence? We find ourselves 
struggling with an ethical dilemma previously raised by Ross Gray and 
Christina Sinding in their performance work with women living with cancer: 
“how carefully people should or can be ‘held’ in such a project” (2002, p. 
134). 

In this paper we have presented the script of a forum theatre scene, 
highlighting the eugenic legacy that shapes the current context in which 
labeled people consider parenthood. While the project raised many issues 
(including voice, the neoliberalization of research, the cultural construction of 
the good parent, and child welfare policy and practice), we have focused here 
on some questions emerging from this scene’s performance. We present 
questions that may help us begin to map out intimate justice for labeled 
persons.  

Reimagining parenting possibilities for labeled people is not simply 
important political work; it is necessary for survival. Normative 
understandings of parenthood fail to contest its current neoliberal 
formulations (self-sufficient, self-contained, competent, efficient, productive, 



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and so forth). All parents are encouraged to  “join the ranks of the privileged” 
(Mingus, 2011), which threaten to leave behind those of us who cannot easily 
be folded into normative structures – structures that, when they remain intact, 
continue to oppress (Chandler & Ignagni, n.d). Normative parenthood fails to 
break with the devaluation of difference – whatever form that difference may 
take – and does little to loosen the knot of disability, race, gender, class, 
sexuality, and colonial relations that shape and maintain the marginalization 
and exclusion of so many who seek to build families. 

As the RPP team captured in Making Lemonade, when labeled people 
begin to imagine their parenting possibilities, they are perceived as disruptive 
and are quickly contained. Within this context the difference of disability can 
only be seen as undesirable, a site of “no future.” This cultural failure to 
desire, welcome, and embrace disability enacts Kathleen Lynch’s idea of 
“affective injustice” towards disabled people as articulated by Shakespeare, 
and may lead to disabled people being deprived of love in their everyday 
lives (Lynch, 2009, as cited in Shakespeare, 2014). 

We understand intimacy as close connections with others that are produced 
in the spaces of our lives that we consider warm, safe, and protective 
(Liddiard, 2016). Intimacy is private, and can involve affectionate, loving, 
and sexual relations. Because intimacy always involves others, it necessarily 
entails negotiation and reciprocity, and always blurs with our public lives 
(Ignagni et al., 2016). Intimacy is mediated by our material circumstances, by 
government policy, our human rights context, our histories, and our social 
locations. Rights protecting our intimate lives, such as those outlined in 
Article 23 of the UN CRPD, certainly make our intimate lives a matter of 
citizenship and, therefore, subjects of public dialogue. But rights approaches 
only go so far because they are difficult to enforce, they create new social 
divisions, they require significant material and symbolic capital to enact, and 
they cannot adequately address the complexity of our relationships with our 
partners, our children, and the other social relations that constitute our lives.  

Turning to Disability Justice activist Mia Mingus (2011), we can heed her 
assertion that we must, “mov[e] away from an equality-based model of 
sameness and ‘we are just like you’ to a model of disability that embraces 
difference, confronts privilege and challenges what is considered ‘normal’ on 
every front” (n.p.). Intimate justice may attend to the sorts of questions 
emerging from the forum theatre scenes that we have delineated above. It 
demands that we attend to who has (and who does not have) access to an 
intimate life; whose lives are free(er) from surveillance, intrusion, and 
containment; and who are able to access the material and social resources that 
support an intimate life. We must open up space for people to build intimate 
lives, such as lives within families, in different ways. And we must attend to 
the privilege, marginalization, and violence that patterns these intimate 
differences such that they might be transformed to allow labeled people to 
partake in family making and the re-making of our worlds. 

Disability, then, helps us move towards intimate justice, by troubling our 



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notions of parenthood. Disability always heralds the arrival of difference and, 
in turn, that difference is always disruptive (Chandler & Ignagni, n.d.). The 
arrival of disability in parenthood might help us imagine new ways to 
collectively raise children, to further de-link biology from kinship, to re-think 
the gendered division of caring labour, or to foster new forms of 
redistributive competence in family making across communities. These sorts 
of reimagined parenthood possibilities centre on the embodied and 
“enminded” experience of disability,5 move towards interdependence, and 
disrupt taken-for-granted notions of “Canadian parenthood.” The disruption 
the difference of disability makes can help us interrogate what is meant by 
parenthood, family, and care, and can gesture to myriad new ways we might 
make family differently: more expansively and in ways that desire disability 
and the difference it makes. 

 
 

Acknowledgements 
 
This project was supported through a research grant from the Ontario 
Ministry of Community and Social Services, Developmental Services Branch 
and Ryerson University, and through Faculty of Community Services Project 
Funds. We wish to acknowledge the tremendous time and energy the RPP co-
researchers devoted to the research, script writing, and performances. Special 
thanks go to Christine Austin, Joanna Drassinower, Kareem Elbard, Rainbow 
Hunt, Renee Morin, and Romeo Pierre. Thanks as well to our community 
partners, Melanie Moore, Lynda Roy, and Ashley Judge from SPIN, as well 
as Springtide Resources and the Centre for Independent Living Toronto. Our 
research assistants, Kim Collins, Tania Jivraj, and Sarah Wren were integral 
throughout many stages of the research and forum theatre performances, as 
was the project’s assistant Kate Peters. Finally, we would like to thank the 
many labeled people and those who support them for sharing their stories 
with us.  
 
 
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