Disabled sexualities: A theoretical review of sociological approaches and a call to problematize the normative/non-normative dialectic

Abstract

In the aftermath of the disability rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s, a number of disability activists and scholars began calling for increased attention to the sexual lives of people with disabilities. The result has been a wide range of research that has explored both the sexual marginalization and sexual empowerment of disabled people across diverse groups and social contexts. Indeed, while a number of reviews of research on disabled sexualities have already been written, they have either been too narrowly focused on niche topics, or provide such a broad overview of disabled sexuality that they do not adequately discuss the different theoretical perspectives guiding such research. In this paper, I offer more developed articulations of the theoretical perspectives underpinning scholarship on the sexualities of people with disabilities, and call for a “reproblematizing” of the complex dialectical relationship between “normative” and “non-normative” deployments of sexuality that go into acts of “queering” and sexual empowerment amongst disabled people.