Access Intimacy: Beyond Logistics Towards Belonging By Jefrin Hussain

The concept of access intimacy was coined by disability justice activist and writer Mia Mingus in 2011 through her blog, “Leaving Evidence”. The author described it as an "elusive, hard to describe feeling when someone else gets your access needs" and a sense of comfort that a disabled person's entire self experiences. The concept has since grown into an important framework within disability studies, though academic writings on the term remain sparse relative to its influence in activist communities.

At the core, access intimacy is a relational experience. It is the kind of ease a person feels when their access needs are fully met, sometimes with complete strangers, sometimes built slowly over years (Mingus, 2011). Access intimacy is not dependent on someone having a political understanding of disability, ableism or access. This distinguishes access intimacy from mere compliance or technical accommodation: it is about genuine understanding rather than procedural box-ticking.

The concept was further developed by Mingus in her 2017 Paul K. Longmore Lecture at San Francisco State University. There, she positioned access intimacy within a broader framework of interdependence and disability justice. Access intimacy moves the work of access out of the realm of only logistics and into the realm of relationships, understanding disabled people as humans rather than burdens. In this sense, it offers a direct challenge to how access is typically framed, as a technical problem belonging to the individual disabled person, and repositions it as a shared, relational, and political matter.

This challenge to conventional approaches is taken up by Ktenidis (2025) in the context of higher education. In the lecture on “ Anti-Ableism in Teaching & Research” by Ktenidis, they distinguished  between common institutional approaches to access, treating it as an individual's problem, as an afterthought, or as a one-size-fits-all solution, and an anti-ableist approach that treats access as a social justice matter and a starting point, not an endpoint. Access intimacy fits firmly within this anti-ableist framing: it asks institutions and individuals alike to be genuinely present to the access needs of disabled people, rather than retroactively patching over exclusion.

Access intimacy is interdependence in action. It is an acknowledgement that what is most important is not whether or not things are perfectly accessible, but rather what the impact of inaccessibility and ableism is on disabled people and our lives. This is a significant reorientation. Rather than asking whether a ramp exists or whether a form was filled in, access intimacy asks: “Is the disabled person actually able to participate, to belong, to be at ease?”

For Mingus, access intimacy is not charity, an ego boost, or a trade for survival. It is a feeling that both generates and is an expression of new patterns of relating and belonging. This understanding has direct implications for how universities design their environments, train their staff, and build their research cultures. Projects like the Wellcome Anti-Ableist Research Culture (WAARC) initiative at the University of Sheffield reflect this ambition, seeking to move beyond surface-level inclusion towards what Mingus would recognise as genuine access intimacy, where disabled researchers are not simply accommodated but are understood, centred, and valued.

Access intimacy is critical to disability justice because there will never be any work with disabled people that does not include accessibility work. However, as Mingus and Ktenidis both suggest, accessibility work that stops at logistics is insufficient. What is needed is the cultivation of relationships and institutional cultures in which access needs are anticipated, not merely reacted to, where belonging is not something disabled people must fight for, but something they are offered from the start.

References

Ktenidis, A. (2025). Anti-ableism in teaching and research [Lecture slides]. University of Sheffield.

Mingus, M. (2011, May 5). Access intimacy: The missing link. Leaving Evidence. https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2011/05/05/access-intimacy-the-missing-link/

Mingus, M. (2017, April 12). Access intimacy, interdependence and disability justice. Leaving Evidence. https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2017/04/12/access-intimacy-interdependence-and-disability-justice/