Staying in Touch: Consent, Access, and Cruising in Ryan J. Haddad's Dark Disabled Stories

Abstract: Ryan J. Haddad's Dark Disabled Stories (DDS) dramatizes how access can reshape aesthetic form and reimagine consent as an ongoing, relational act grounded in care, risk, and sensory exchange. Drawing on José Esteban Muñoz's reading of Samuel R. Delany, the essay frames queer cruising as a technique of generating sensorial excess through fragmentation. This opens a conceptual portal to Mia Mingus's notion of access intimacy: a justice-oriented interdependence rooted in disabled sensation. I analyze fragmented scenes and layered accommodations as they generate what Tobin Siebers calls an "assault on autonomy." While this assault may initially seem at odds with consensual interdependence, it instead produces aesthetic excess that overwhelms and touches the audience, provoking a reciprocal ethic of care and consent. Considering the sexual, practical, and aesthetic dimensions of cruising as a staging method cripped by access dramaturgy, this essay argues that DDS reconfigures how audiences engage with access, discomfort, and consent.