Overcoming Objectification by Ann J. Cahill

Author:Ann J. Cahill [Cahill, Ann J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Psychology, Human Sexuality, Social Science, Feminism & Feminist Theory, Women's Studies, Gender Studies
ISBN: 9781136859311
Google: OpOsAgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2012-01-25T05:42:18+00:00

The persistent belief in the asexuality of disabled people resulted not only in such acutely oppressive policies as forced sterilization, but also in only slightly more subtle practices, such as sex-segregation in institutional settings (which assumes that any sexuality that may be expressed would be heterosexual in nature) and the utter lack of sex education (see Civjan 1996 and Leibowitz 2005): two practices that continue to this day.

Such practices seem designed to contain any sexuality that may rear its illicit head in the lives of disabled persons, and as such they are a serious infringement on their bodily freedom. However, for many disabled women in particular, equally damaging is their persistent sexual invisibility, that is, the ways in which their bodies are excluded from virtually all sexualizing gazes. Nancy Mairs writes,

It’s bad enough to carry your genitals like a sealed envelope bearing the cipher that, once unlocked, might loose the chaotic flood of female pleasure—jouissance, the French call it—upon the world-of-the-same. But I have an additional reason to feel shame for my body, less explicitly connected with its sexuality: it is a crippled body. Thus it is doubly other, not merely by the homo-sexual standards of patriarchal culture but by the standards of physical desirability erected for every body in our world.

(1990, 86)

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