WGSI Research Seminar – Ph.D students in the Collaborative Program in Women and Gender Studies present their research.

Meg Gibson, PhD Candidate, Faculty of Social Work, University of Toronto, “LGBTQ parents of children with disabilities: An ongoing project.”

In this presentation, I describe my ongoing dissertation research, an ethnographic investigation with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) parents of children with disabilities or ‘special needs’.

As I discuss in “Intersecting deviance: social work, difference, and the legacy of eugenics”, social work (along with many other fields) has embraced “intersectionality” as a central model of human difference, but it has done so in ways that present difference as static, individual, and certain. In contrast, a historical exploration of queerness and disability — and their overlapping and contested relations to reproduction — suggests that we invoke intersectionality differently, attending to relations, narratives, and institutional interactions. Introducing some of the emerging themes from my interviews with LGBTQ parents of children with disabilities, I will highlight how my conceptual model has encouraged particular lines of questioning and analysis as I consider a blend of material, relational, and institutional pressures on parents’ everyday experiences.