Black-abundance, Fat-revolt, and Crip-desire: Intersectionality as Interference in the Life and Death of Rohan Garfield Salmon

Abstract

This chapter is an examination of the life and death of Mr. Rohan Garfield Salmon, an evicted resident of a long-term care home in Ontario, Canada. It will be shown that Rohan’s experiences both demonstrate the healthcare system’s abject failures as well as the agentic capacity of difference. Rohan’s case, more than highlighting the deplorable state of care in the nursing home-industrial-complex, suggests that critical analyses of intersecting social categories must consider the emergence of those categories in intra-actions – in emergence with other humans and nonhumans. The authors argue that Rohan simultaneously experienced constricting forces from dominant cultural understandings of fatness, blackness, and disability and also produced equally disrupting and interfering forces – reimagining the capacities and desires of his bodymind. In particular, the chapter will highlight how fat/black/disability-becomings created certain conditions that successfully prevented the state from exercising its force for nearly 2 years. The authors invite scholars to consider how such analyses, that take into consideration the material things, can open up ways of understanding the different capacities of individuals too often already marked as disposable.