Contested Pleasures and Governmentality

Abstract

In the contemporary western world, considerations of sexual pleasures and sexual desire in the lives of disabled people play very little part in lay consciousness, and practically none in the socio-political economy. The most significant exception is when the negative reading of such concerns serves to activate an inclination to contain and control supposedly troublesome expressions of sexuality. The problem is that in the context of mainstream values, the conjunction of disability and sexuality troubles the parameters of the social and legal policy that purports both to protect the rights and interests of individuals, and to promote the good of the socio-political order. In addition to its theoretical framing, this chapter illustrates that problem with reference to some very substantive issues, and while its focus is firmly on the Anglo-American context, I suspect the argument could be extended to other locations where heteronormativity is the dominant force. The concern of both social policy and law is to encompass the bodies of all within a governmental grasp, yet clearly some forms of corporeality exceed the limits of what is thinkable. It is, as I have suggested, as though the very being of anomalous embodiment mobilises both an overt and an unspoken anxiety, an anxiety that is at its most acute in relation to sexuality. The outcome is the strange paradox evident in western society that alternates between denying that sexual pleasure has any place in the lives of disabled people, and fetishising it.