19. Navigating Sexual Health within a Desexualized Body: HIV/AIDS & Disability

Abstract


 This research explores commonly overlooked intersections of disability and HIV/AIDS, theorizing that institutional desexualization of disabled students in educational settings is correlated with higher rates of HIV transmission later in life. Working primarily within the fields of disability studies, HIV/AIDS studies, and gender studies, this project targets the gap in research on disability and HIV/AIDS, understanding disabled individuals as being at a heightened risk for HIV transmission yet simultaneously being less likely to receive sexual health education than non-disabled peers, as seen in emerging research by Nora Grace (2003; 2004). This research theorizes a relationship between institutional desexualization and HIV transmission later in life. Specifically, this relationship may exist in the following pattern, beginning with early and continued desexualization of disabled individuals leading to social assumptions of universal asexuality, thus potentially causing a lack of sexual health resources and education due to this assumed sexual inactivity. A lack of sexual health resources may influence higher rates of engagement in high-risk sexual activity due to this lack of sexual health knowledge among disabled individuals, which could thus account for higher rates of HIV transmission within disabled populations. In establishing disabled individuals as at heightened risk for HIV and disrupting the desexualization of disability, I provide recommendations for future research and policy pathways in the aim of further exploring the intersections of HIV/AIDS and disability in order to reduce the rates of HIV transmission within disabled population.