You Could Truly Be Yourself If You Just Weren't You: Sexuality, Disabled Body Space, and the (Neo)Liberal Politics of Self-Help

Abstract

Recent work in disability studies has drawn attention to the changing relationship between the visual representations of disability and contemporary US capitalism. One change identified is a newfound cultural recognition of disabled sexuality. In this paper I extend these arguments by considering the kinds of sexuality projected onto the disabled body at the intersection of regimes of disability, sexuality, and neoliberalism. I provide a governmentality/queer reading of visual representations of disabled sexuality and of two self-help disabled sex manuals to argue that interest in disabled sex may witness an investment in the ongoing production of normative sexualities, what Foucault called a ‘truth of the self, within the context of neoliberal spatialities of disability. Based on dominant cultural understandings of sex as ‘natural’, ‘predictable’, and ‘representable’, these self-help manuals serve to produce a framework that depoliticizes the claims of disability culture movements. These manuals render the project of disabled sexual liberation a personal project of self-governance that scarcely challenges contemporary structures of (neo)liberalism.

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