The disabled sex and technologies of normality : On intersections of gender, sexuality and intellectual disabilities
2011
Abstract
This analysis interrogates discursive practices used in sexual education directed at "intellectually disabled". With the help of intersectional analysis that uncovers the mutual contingencies of gender, sexuality and handicap, the text examines the technologies of normalcy used in sexual education to legitimize (and normalize) sexuality of the (intellecutally) disabled.
The argument of the text is that the strategies of normalisation may in fact exacerbate the disabling mechanisms that are at work in the first place. Sexuality needs to be recognised as one powerful location of disablement, as well as part of the gender order and gender based domination that underwrite the ideologies of compulsory ablebodiedness.