Access Fictions

Abstract Disability studies has traditionally presented “access” as an unqualified good and a material one at that. However, engaging with the potentialities of mad opacity show us the way in which demand for access to transparency and frictionless understanding reproduces ableist institutional violence. Engaging with various strategies of opacity practice by users on Tumblr, particularly those that participate in what the author calls xenoidentity/alterhuman spaces, this article will address the stakes of both maintaining and questioning the importance of opacity. The author also offers the opportunity to consider what kinds of knowledges are inextricably linked to practices and indeed policies of opacity and opaque care. Rather than offering simplistic solutions, the author invites the reader to sit together in a position of access friction engendered by not only the presence of people who happen to be racialized, trans, and/or Mad in a disability space, but also by thinking capaciously with transmad histology, methodologies, and localities.