ABSTRACT
This chapter explores disability life writing as equipment for living, arguing that specific disabled writers exhibit significant rhetorical strategies powered by intimate, physical interconnection. To recognize and value these strategies, it proposes a grammar of disability life writing focused on the sense of touch among interconnected people, places and things because of the critical role of physical interconnection and interdependence plays in disability experience. Exploring three recent examples of academic life writing by United States-based writers – Christina Crosby, Eli Clare and Mel Chen – the chapter explains how each negotiates writing challenges as disability or chronic illness changes their writing experience. Focusing on the physical connection and its representation in writing, it shows how these writers shape a grammar of rhetorical touch comprised of people, places and things. Disability life writing necessarily involves rhetorics that feature other people, places and things because disability is a fundamentally interdependent experience.
