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SEX AND DISABILITY

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments............................................................................................................................................................ixIntroduction ANNA MOLLOW AND ROBERT MCRUER................................................................................................................................11 A Sexual Culture for Disabled People TOBIN SIEBERS......................................................................................................................372 Bridging Theory and Experience: A Critical-Interpretive Ethnography of Sexuality and Disability RUSSELL SHUTTLEWORTH....................................................543 The Sexualized Body of the Child: Parents and the Politics of "Voluntary" Sterilization of People Labeled Intellectually Disabled MICHEL DESJARDINS.....................694 Dismembering the Lynch Mob: Intersecting Narratives of Disability, Race, and Sexual Menace MICHELLE JARMAN..............................................................895 "That Cruel Spectacle": The Extraordinary Body Eroticized in Lucas Malet's The History of Sir Richard Calmady RACHEL O'CONNELL..........................................1086 Pregnant Men: Modernism, Disability, and Biofuturity MICHAEL DAVIDSON...................................................................................................1237 Touching Histories: Personality, Disability, and Sex in the 1930s DAVID SERLIN..........................................................................................1458 Leading with Your Head: On the Borders of Disability, Sexuality, and the Nation NICOLE MARKOTIC AND ROBERT MCRUER.......................................................1659 Normate Sex and Its Discontents ABBY L. WILKERSON.......................................................................................................................18310 I'm Not the Man I Used to Be: Sex, HIV, and Cultural "Responsibility" CHRIS BELL.......................................................................................20811 Golem Girl Gets Lucky RIVA LEHRER......................................................................................................................................23112 Fingered LEZLIE FRYE...................................................................................................................................................25613 Sex as "Spock": Autism, Sexuality, and Autobiographical Narrative RACHAEL GRONER.......................................................................................26314 Is Sex Disability? Queer Theory and the Disability Drive ANNA MOLLOW...................................................................................................28515 An Excess of Sex: Sex Addiction as Disability LENNARD J. DAVIS.........................................................................................................31316 Desire and Disgust: My Ambivalent Adventures in Devoteeism ALISON KAFER................................................................................................33117 Hearing Aid Lovers, Pretenders, and Deaf Wannabes: The Fetishizing of Hearing KRISTEN HARMON...........................................................................355Works Cited................................................................................................................................................................373Contributors...............................................................................................................................................................393Index......................................................................................................................................................................399

Chapter One

A SEXUAL CULTURE FOR DISABLED PEOPLE

Sexuality is not a right which must be earned or a possession that must be purchased, but a state of being accessible to all individuals. Even those who sometimes have to fight for that access. —Lucy Grealy, "In the Realm of the Senses"

The emergence in recent decades of people who define their identities based on sexual preferences and practices is transforming the landscape of minority politics. Sexual minorities are fighting for the rights and privileges accorded to majority populations on many legal and political fronts. The fight over gay marriage is only the most public and contentious of current struggles for full and equal rights by a sexual minority. Proponents of minority sexual identity attack the neat division between the private and public spheres, the relevance of the traditional family and its institutions of marriage and child rearing, and the moral certainty that sexuality is better controlled or repressed than set free. Claims that sexuality is a major part of a person's identity, that sexual liberation is a good in itself, and that sexual expression is a civil right crucial to human happiness have led to new conceptions of civic life linked to sex. Jeffrey Weeks argues that attention to sexual identity gives birth to the "sexual citizen." For him, sexual citizenship remedies "limitations of earlier notions of citizenship" (39), focuses attention on "sexualized identities" (38), and blunts "forces that inhibit" the "free, consensual development" of human relationships "in a democratic polity committed to full and equal citizenship" (38). Kenneth Plummer also represents the new sexual identities as a form of citizenship, defining "intimate citizenship" as "the control (or not) over one's body, feelings, relationships: access (or not) to representations, relationships, public spaces, etc; and socially grounded choices (or not) about identities, gender experiences" (14). Finally, Abby Wilkerson notes that oppressed groups tend to share the experience of sexual repression, explaining that sexual agency is central to political agency and that "sexual democracy should be recognized as a key political struggle" ("Disability" 35).

The emphasis on control over one's body, access to public spaces, and political agency will sound familiar to disability rights activists. Disabled people have long struggled to take control of their bodies from medical authorities and to gain access to built environments and public institutions. Like the sexual minorities described by Weeks, Plummer, and Wilkerson, disabled people experience sexual repression, possess little or no sexual autonomy, and tolerate institutional and legal restrictions on their intimate conduct. Moreover, legal and institutional forces inhibit their ability to express their sexuality freely and to develop consensual relationships with sexual partners.

It would be an exaggeration to define the oppression of disabled people exclusively in the sexual context; not many people with disabilities consider themselves a sexual minority. Nevertheless, I want to argue that disabled people do constitute a significant sexual minority and that recognizing their status as sexual citizens will advance the cause of other sexually oppressed groups. "Sexuality is often," Anne Finger explains about people with disabilities, "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...