Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction / Anna Mollow and Robert McRuer 1
Part I: Access 1
1. A Sexual Culture for Disabled People / Tobin Siebers 37
2. Bridging Theory and Experience: A Critical-Interpretive Ethnography of Sexuality and Disability / Russell Shuttleworth 54
3. The Sexualized Body of the Child: Parents and the Politics of "Voluntary" Sterilization of People Labeled Intellectually Disabled / Michel Desjardins 69
Part II: Histories
4. Dismembering the Lynch Mob: Intersecting Narratives of Disability, Race, and Sexual Menace / Michelle Jarman 89
5. "That Cruel Spectacle": The Extraordinary Body Eroticized in Lucas Malet's The History of Sir Richard Calmady / Rachel O'Connell 108
6. Pregnant Men: Modernism, Disability, and Biofuturity / Michael Davidson 123
7. Touching Histories: Personality, Disability, and Sex in the 1930s / David Serlin 145
Part III: Spaces
8. Leading with Your Head: On the Borders of Disability, Sexuality, and the Nation / Nicole Markotic and Robert McRuer 165
9. Normate Sex and Its Discontents / Abby L. Wilkerson 183
10. I'm Not the Man I Used to Be: Sex, HIV, and Cultural "Responsibility" / Chris Bell 208
Part IV: Lives
11. Golem Girl Gets Lucky / Riva Lehrer 231
12. Fingered / Lezlie Frye 256
13. Sex as "Spock": Autism, Sexuality, and Autobiographical Narrative / Rachel Groner 263
Part V: Desires
14. Is Sex Disability?: Queer Theory and the Disability Drive / Anna Mollow 285
15. An Excess of Sex: Sex Addiction as Disability / Lennard J. Davis 313
16. Desire and Disgust: My Ambivalent Adventures in Divoteeism / Alison Kafer 331
17. Hearing Aid Lovers, Pretenders, and Deaf Wannabees: The Fetishizing of Hearing / Kristen Harmon 355
Works Cited 373
Contributors 393
Index 399

Promotional Information

This collection brings together scholars and artists in disability studies, sexuality, queer theory, and feminism, to show how much sexuality studies and disability studies have to learn from each other. In particular, by focusing on the desires and sexual experiences of disabled persons, readers are forced to think about what counts as sex and sexuality differently. Similarly, some essays discuss the importance of visibility in what counts as disability, and the difficulty of claiming rights for limitations that can't easily be seen. The essays are organized into five sections around key concepts (access, histories, spaces, lives, and desires) that together provide a more expansive and better-historicized view of both disability and sexuality.

About the Author

Robert McRuer is Professor of English at the George Washington University. He is the author of Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability and The Queer Renaissance: Contemporary American Literature and the Reinvention of Lesbian and Gay Identities.

Anna Mollow is a PhD candidate in English at the University of California, Berkeley.

Reviews

"This riveting collection of essays is a fascinating rethinking of what sex and disability could feel like together, affirmatively and generatively. Opening with a candid, frank introduction that moves deftly between the autobiographical and the political, the volume mounts a serious challenge to the sex-ableism of queer theory and the tendency to think of sex and disability in negative terms. Having read about pregnant men, the vagaries of touch, amputee devotees, and sex addiction, the reader will emerge uncertain about what exactly sex is, who has it, and with what. More trenchantly, these works demand an acknowledgement of how notions of ableism severely limit broader experiences of sexual erotics, intimacy, and arousal. Kudos to the editors for undertaking this important project." Jasbir Puar, author of Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times "This is a big collection, literally, politically, and theoretically. With essays drawing on sociology, anthropology, literary studies, history, and cultural studies, as well as some more lyrical, performative, and autobiographical, Sex and Disability will be indispensable for a wide range of audiences in gender studies, disability studies, queer studies and beyond." Siobhan B. Somerville, author of Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture "Disability and sex have long been intersecting topics of great significance in the disability-rights community, but more often than not have been treated as curiosities by non-disabled people... The new anthology Sex and Disability posits that people with disabilities are a group that has, by and large, either been stigmatized by the able because of their supposed "abnormal" sexuality, or desexualized entirely... Sex and Disability is worth picking up just for the variety of topics it covers - queer sexuality, HIV/AIDS, sexual narratives in autobiographical works by people with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), the 2005 documentary Murderball and athletic disability nationalism, the disability politics of racist hate crimes, gender politics in the online amputee/devotee community, and more." Anna Hamilton, Bitch, Summer 2012