IDs: Physically Disabled, Queer, Nonbinary, Transgender
Author IDs: Physically Disabled, Queer, Nonbinary, Transgender
CWs: Mention of systemic ableism and transphobia
MacNutt’s story features Vasily, a queer disabled protagonist with government-controlled tech implants. The implants serve as adaptive tech for him, and help him have more strength and better control over his movement. He also has “resonators” that serve as care workers of sorts, helping him get dressed, prepare food, etc. After a chance encounter with a member of an underground “body liberation group,” Vasily finds himself dreaming of becoming involved in the group. He thinks, “If there was a way to shapeshift yourself, even just a glamour, without going through the governmental demands and scrutiny involved in aesthetic licensure or authorised gender alteration, he wanted to know. He ached for it” (MacNutt 110). Vasily reaches out to the member, called Ammon, to learn more about their work. Ammon reprograms Vasily’s implants so that they are no longer under government control. He also tells Vasily that there are a number of body liberation adaptations that their group can do. Vasily is astonished, thinking that “Certainly someone like him would never meet the criteria for sanctioned androgyny, or for any change like that; the mandate was mutually exclusive with adaptive licensure” (119). In Vasily’s world, much like our own, he is not eligible for both adaptive tech and gender-affirming tech. MacNutt pinpoints the difficult intersection that many trans disabled people live at. For so many of us, we are not eligible for one kind of support if we receive another. It is immensely difficult to navigate such a system, and requires way more time and energy than many trans disabled people have to give. MacNutt’s story does not use adaptive technology to explore the ways that disability or transness could be cured, but rather, how adaptive tech can encourage and allow alternate ways of embodying queer crip existence.
Discussion Questions1. How does MacNutt explore bodily autonomy through adaptive tech and “body liberation”?
2. Why does MacNutt call the group a “body liberation group”? How does MacNutt separate liberation from government systems? What is the effect of this separation?
3. How does MacNutt present queer disabled autonomy in this story?
4. Why is the story entitled “morphic resonance”? What is the significance of “resonance” in the body liberation group’s work? In the story as a whole?