Materiality, Writing, Subjectivity

We start the paper by reviewing the theory of desire developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Their theory of desire is complex in narrative terms, but it is, or so we suggest, overly romantic. It doesn't really explore the ways in which different performances of desire intersect with one another. We then proceed by telling stories from the life of a severely physically disabled person, Liv. These are stories to do with desire, and they are intended to show (with Deleuze and Guattari) that desires are discursively complex, and that they are produced in specific materially heterogeneous circumstances. But the stories are also intended to explore the intersections of different kinds of desires — and indeed the ways in which they produce one another. We conclude by returning to the question of story-telling, and press the view, touched on above, that single stories about persons (or their contexts) are unable to catch the ways in which different stories intersect to produce personal and social realities.