The Routledge Handbook of Disability and Sexuality

Russell Shuttleworth, Linda Mona, Russell Shuttleworth, Linda Mona

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429952302
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

This handbook provides a much-needed holistic overview of disability and sexuality research and scholarship. With authors from a wide range of disciplines and representing a diversity of nationalities, it provides a multi-perspectival view that fully captures the diversity of issues and outlooks.

Organised into six parts, the contributors explore long-standing issues such as the psychological, interpersonal, social, political and cultural barriers to sexual access that disabled people face and their struggle for sexual rights and participation. The volume also engages issues that have been on the periphery of the discourse, such as sexual accommodations and support aimed at facilitating disabled people's sexual well-being; the socio-sexual tensions confronting disabled people with intersecting stigmatised identities such as LGBTBI or asexual; and the sexual concerns of disabled people in the Global South. It interrogates disability and sexuality from diverse perspectives, from more traditional psychological and sociological models, to various subversive and post-theoretical perspectives and queer theory. This handbook examines the cutting-edge, and sometimes ethically contentious, concerns that have been repressed in the field.

With current, international and comprehensive content, this book is essential reading for students, academics and researchers in the areas of disability, gender and sexuality, as well as applied disciplines such as healthcare practitioners, counsellors, psychology trainees and social workers.

Part I

Theoretical frames and intersections

1
Theorising disabled people’s sexual, intimate, and erotic lives

Current theories for disability and sexuality

Kirsty Liddiard

Introduction

Whereas there is now considerable literature and research on disability and sexuality, there remain fewer explorations of disabled people’s intimate and interpersonal relationships with sexual partners, and experiences of and engagements with intimacy and love (Ignagni et al. 2016; Liddiard 2018). Culturally, disabled people are routinely assumed to lack the capabilities and capacities to embody and experience sexuality and desire, as well as the agency to love and be loved by others and to build their own families, if they so choose. In the past, much of this sexual oppression and exclusion was rendered unimportant by academics and activists, in comparison with other areas of life, and, as such, was deprioritised within both academic and activist contexts in favour of a focus on disabled people’s social and political histories (Finger 1992; Shakespeare et al. 1996). This omission was felt strongly within disability rights movements, although it was seldom publicly acknowledged—as the words of activist Anne Finger (1992, p. 8), in an early edition of the New Internationalist, show:

Sexuality is often the source of our deepest oppression; it is also often the source of our deepest pain. It’s easier for us to talk about—and formulate strategies for changing—discrimination in employment, education and housing than to talk about our exclusion from sexuality and reproduction.

Finger’s words are reproduced in many scholarly writings on disability and sexuality—you’ll likely find them throughout this important book. This is no coincidence: Her words reached the very heart of key problems within the disability rights and justice movements of the era because they highlight the marked exclusion of sexuality. In later years, however, following the publication of the text by Shakespeare et al. (1996, p. 1), Untold Desires: The Sexual Politics of Disability, there have been myriad attempts to commence a dialogue about the sexualities of disabled people across multiple disciplines and activist movements: Sexology, Rehabilitation Studies, Sociology, Cultural Studies, the Disability Rights Movement, Crip Activism, Critical Sexuality Studies and, of course, Disability Studies.

In this chapter, I contemplate a smörgåsbord of approaches to theorising the sexual, intimate and erotic lives of disabled people. Throughout, I purposefully centre the sexual stories of disabled people co-constructed through my own sociological research (Liddiard 2018). As both a disability studies scholar and a disabled woman, it is crucial for me to continually locate the lived and material realities of disability life into my theoretical reworkings. As such, the politics of location are vital to my work (see Liddiard 2018). Through this positionality, I show how we often live within and through the theories we construct; how theory isn’t as detached from the mundanity of everyday life as we typically assume; and how theory gets under our skin and just won’t leave us be (see Goodley 2016). I begin, then, by situating Critical Disability Studies as a politicised, ethical and transdisciplinary foundation from which to explore disabled sexualities. Next, I consider the material makings of sexual bodies and selves, drawing upon the impacts of biological essentialism as a reductionism that routinely Others disabled people’s sexual lives, bodies and identities. Following this, I imagine otherwise through queer theory and crip theory, questioning their ability to forge a more radical sexual politics of disability that speaks to the everyday lived lives of disabled people. In the final section, I draw upon more recent developments to disability theory, namely Posthuman Disability Studies and DisHuman Studies (Goodley et al. 2014b; see also dishuman.com), which seek “more expanded, crip [and] relational forms of the human” (Goodley et al. 2017). I explore the extent to which these emerging perspectives can pave new ways of imagining and advocating for disabled people’s sexual and intimate futures. I conclude this chapter by questioning whether critical social theories, as currently constructed, can adequately theorise the lived, embodied and material realities of disabled people’s sexual, intimate and erotic lives.

Theorising with Critical Disability Studies

As I state in my recently authored book, The Intimate Lives of Disabled People (Liddiard 2018, p. 15), “theory and theorising, quite rightly, can be messy jobs.” To understand and theorise the sexual, intimate and erotic lives of disabled people means applying myriad critical theories, such as feminism, interactionism, phenomenology and poststructuralism, and crip, queer, postmodern and psychoanalytic approaches to disability, the body, gender, sexuality, identity, embodiment and subjectivity. Critical Disability Studies is the vehicle through which I do so in my own explorations of disabled sexualities. Critical Disability Studies, to me, is a politicised, ethical and transdisciplinary space—crucially, one that “connects the aspirations and ambitions of disabled people with the transformative agendas of class, feminist, queer, and postcolonial studies” (Goodley 2011a, p. 174). Critical Disability Studies enables a clear focus on, and validation of, the intersections of disability life, connecting disability with the politics of class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and nation. As Meekosha and Shuttleworth (2009, p. 50) suggest, in doing so, Critical Disability Studies emphasises that that the struggle for social justice and diversity subsists “on another plane of development—one that is not simply social, economic, and political, but also psychological, cultural, discursive and carnal.” Such an intersectional understanding of disability markedly builds upon the predominantly Marxist and materialist-orientated approaches to disability promulgated through the social model. The social model of disability laid “the blame for disabled people’s oppression clearly at the feet of economic relations in capitalistic society” (Meekosha and Shuttleworth 2009, p. 55). With its unrelenting focus on civil rights and structural disablism, the social model simultaneously omitted equal political focus towards the private and intimate lives of disabled people (see Liddiard 2018 for a longer history; Shakespeare et al. 1996).

Key to Critical Disability Studies is its commitment to destabilising and contesting disablism and ableism. For clarity, Campbell (2009, p. 44) defines ableism as a “network of beliefs, processes and practices that produces a particular kind of self and body (the corporeal standard) that is projected as the perfect, species-typical and therefore essential and fully human.” Disablism, on the other hand, is the resultant oppressive treatment of disabled people. Where I use the term “dis/ableism” I refer to the iterative processes of ableism and disablism that “casts [disabled people] as a diminished state of being human.” Significantly, Critical Disability Studies acknowledges that studies of disability and ability are routinely political and politicised. Theory, as currently constructed, is not separate to nor detached from the everyday lived realities of living with and through disability, but begins there. Therefore, quite often I follow others (Campbell 2001; 2009; Davis 2002; Goodley 2014; Rose 2001) in turning my attention away from disability and onto ableist hegemony or “ableist-normativity” (Campbell 2008, p. 1)—something now known as Critical Ableism Studies or Ability Studies (Wolbring 2008). A clear focus on ableism, then, disrupts “those normative homelands that all of us are forced to populate” (Goodley 2014, p. 194). Elsewhere, I (and others—see Gill 2015) have called this, “sexual ableism”: an understanding that the Othering of disabled sexualities emerges through the dominance of the deeply ableist (and hetero/sexist) institutions of heteronormativity and heterosexuality (discussed later). Thus, sexual ableism—to me, as someone who has explored the complexities and intricacies of disabled people’s own sexual stories through research (see Liddiard 2018)—is the impossibility of sexual normalcy for myriad bodies and minds. As Lucille, a heterosexual married 36-year-old cisgender woman with an acquired spinal injury, said in my research (Liddiard 2018, p. 103):

Why would you want to have sex if you couldn’t feel anything other than a weird nerve pain and why would someone want sex with a girl who couldn’t orgasm?

Lucille’s words emphasise the ways that people with acquired impairment can feel desexualised following the transition to a disabled identity, but also that her newly queered body (which no longer achieves pleasure in normative ways) is uncomfortable, because it challenges culturally dominant preconceptions of what (and where) pleasure and erogenous sensation should take place. Thus, the impossibility of meeting the demands of sexual normalcy can be a root cause of the (sexual) oppression of disabled people, and many other sexual minorities that don’t fit. Mike Gill (2015, p. 151) defines sexual ableism as “the system of imbuing sexuality with determinations of qualification to be sexual based on criteria of ability, morality, physicality, appearance, age, race, social acceptability and gender conformity.”

Critically, the sexual stories of disabled people that underpin my book emphasised sexual ableism and the privileging of sexual normalcy as significantly impactful to individual, lived and psycho-emotional experiences of sexual opportunities, identities and intimate relationships with others (Liddiard 2018). In this framing, disability can only ever be lived and experienced as being troublesome towards meeting heteronormative ideals—a product of sexual ableism. For example, informants’ sexual stories (Liddiard 2018, p. 166):

Privileged normative sexuality as a central theme: normative gender categories and heterosexuality were upheld and privileged as given, natural and fixed. Intimate relationships and coupledom were strongly desired and seen to affirm a sense of intimate citizenship (Plummer 2003), as well as to confirm worth and desirability. Sexual expression and gratification were understood as inherently natural (particularly in the context of male bodies) and obtaining pleasure served to proffer social value, evidence one’s humanness and ‘constitute full subjectivity’ (Shuttleworth 2000, p. 280). Normative bodily aesthetics were revered and strived for (most notably by women), and the prescribed phallocentric and orgasmic “mechanics” of heteronormative practice remained the immovable embodied norms from which other alternative sexual methods, interactions and pleasures were judged.

This analysis shows the ways in which heteronormativity, and its bedfellow, sexual ableism, continue to shape the sexual subjectivities of, and have psycho-emotional consequences for, those who are excluded from its narrow boundaries. Sexual ableism propagates a normalcy, a perfection of body, self and pleasure, which no one, in reality, can ever achieve (see McRuer 2006a). Sexual ableism, then, merely serves to marginalise a diversity of bodies and minds, and guard the boundaries of, as Margrit Shildrick (2007, p. 221; original emphasis) puts it, “the contested question of who is to count as a sexual subject.” In the remaining sections of this chapter, I explore multiple theoretical perspectives and understandings of disability, sexuality and the body to consider what they offer towards theorising the lived, embodied and material realities of disabled people’s sexual, intimate and erotic lives.

Theorising sexual bodies and material selves

Early constructionism, which was embedded in phenomenological and interactionist sociology, redefined the scholarly field of sexualities from the 1960s onwards (see Gagnon and Simon 1973). Constructionism enabled a refusal of essentialist “pre-social” notions of sexuality towards an understanding of sexuality as socially, politically and culturally shaped and produced (Jackson and Scott 2010). Or, as Villanueva (1997, p. 18) suggests, sexualities are “shaped through a system of social, cultural, and interpersonal processes.” In short, essentialist perspectives of sexuality root sexual expression and desire as being purely biological in nature, which arguably denies human agency and autonomy (Jackson 1999). Sexuality emerges, then, as “ethological fallacy” (Gagnon and Simon 1973, p. 3) that pays little attention to humans as “complex, arb...