Disability

Sexuality has long been a fraught aspect of life for people with disabilities, many of whom have been denied what Tobin Siebers terms a “right to a sexual culture.”¹ Ableist ideas about what a “sex life”—and indeed sex itself—are supposed to look like, combined with the myth that people with disabilities “do not experience sexual feelings or that they do not have or want to have sex,” have resulted in many people with disabilities being regarded as “genderless, asexual undesirables.”² At the same time, disability has also been associated historically with hypersexual activity and sexual immorality. In medical and popular discourse, disabled sexuality is thus caught between contradictory representations “of either tragic deficiency or freakish excess.”³ As an object of academic inquiry, sexuality has only recently garnered interest within the field of disability studies. In part, this lacuna can be explained by the field’s effort to distance itself from connotations of “deviance and abnormality.”⁴ Lennard Davis notes that because, historically, people with disabilities were lumped in with other “socially undesirable” groups such as criminals, alcoholics, and hermaphrodites, “[t]he loose association between what we would now call disability and [forms of] criminal activity, mental incompetence, sexual license, and so on established a legacy that people with disabilities are still having trouble living down.”⁵