There is pretty good understanding within disability studies spaces about the barriers individuals face in getting access to a diagnosis (provider biases, access to resources, time, access to health insurance) which can all be considered aspects of inter-activity because of how we see both the formation of disability being created through the lens of race, gender, socio-economic status, body size, etc. but also how experiences of racism, misogyny, antifatness, and classism in medical settings can in turn shape identity formation of non-disabled identity categories.

Intra-Activity and Diagnosis

Michelle Wright coined the term Epiphenomenal time to bring together this idea of closeness and intra-activity by situating the role of social identity - including violence and harm enacted on an individual - to argue that an individual's different experiences are what constitutes different realities.

Epiphenomenal Time

Barad emphasizes in her discussion of entanglement that identity experiences that someone is legible as don't just come into being and then interact with each other, rather if someone is both disbaled and Black or disabled and queer those identities coconstitute each other and start interacting during identity formation to shape how each is embodied by the person. Barad calls this phenomenon intra-activity.

University of Wisconsin - Madison

Karen Barad uses the term entanglement to describe the coconstitutive nature of material and discursive and uses the idea of entanglement to argue that we don't exist in ways that are fully self-contained and free from interaction with multiple frames of existence.

Entanglement

To be legible as being disabled builds off material-discursive existences to explain how someone is seen by the broader world as disabled doesn't only affect whether they are called disabled or the words that are used about their existence, and that others expect them to use about their existence, but it also affects how people get access to medications and treatments, and if someone is seen as deserving of accommodation.

Legibility

Barad, Karen Michelle. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning

Intra-activity

Becoming can be originally attributed to theorists Gilles Deleuze and Feliz Guattari but Price is choosing to use the definition offered by Nirmala Erevelles that draws on feminist-of-color and crip-of-color works. Erevelles described becoming by saying that we can understand race and disability as entangled because in the American context the racialized violence and the materiality of that violence that occurred during the Middle Passage, used to describe the forced trafficking of enslaved people from Africa, is seen as the original space of difference, so disability as a construct should be understood as not coming after or as a consequence of Middle Passage but through Middle Passage. Erevelles' theory foregrounds the importance of recognizing specific political, historical, and material contexts. 

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