Freak 

Although it is now four years since my original research began on this subject, the very notion of “disability and sexuality” still seems an alien and largely taboo subject amongst mainstream, “normal” society. The beauty ideal continues to dictate what is desirable and therefore worthy of sexuality and a sex life. Some progress has been made—with sculptor Marc Quinn’s marble statue of the pregnant Alison Lapper in Trafalgar Square, London, and Lapper’s own growing fame becoming an iconic artist and public figure for disabled people throughout the country. Admittedly, Marc Quinn has been cause for debate amongst some, as a nondisabled artist who depicts disabled people in his work, but what could be more challenging to the sexual taboo than this?

Still, the statue of Alison Lapper does not necessarily reclaim the stereotypes that reinforce prejudices of disabled people as being asexual, freaks, or objects of fetish or voyeurism in the realms of the dark side of sexuality. It does however redress mainstream beauty ideals and highlight the right of disabled people to have children, on an undeniably large scale.

Since 2002, government arts funding organizations have increased support to disabled artists, but with it one gradual change has happened. That is the concerning dilution of “disability art” into “disability and the arts”, which has seen the former slowly lose its original connection to the Disability Rights Movement of the 1980s. Perhaps, disability culture and identity has finally reached the masses and there is no need for artists to want to confront, question, or reclaim stereotypical images in their work? Perhaps rather, mainstream society only wants to look at and listen to what it wants, and chooses to alter, shifting in small paces—like accepting the idea that disabled people actually have sex and have a right to sexual intimacy.

With this slow change I would argue that there is still a place for disability art and disabled artists who want to deal with issues. Art itself crosses boundaries, making us think about the way in which we view the world, ourselves, and each other. The need for sexual physical contact is not considered as freakish in mainstream society when sought and acted on by nondisabled people. Why so with disabled people then?

A Movement and a Model

Since the formation of the disability rights movement in the 1980s, disability art has sought to influence mainstream views and cultural representations of disability in order to promote a specific disability identity.

Disability art allied itself within the movement’s social model concept, which dismisses medicalized views of disability and argues that “…Disability is not a condition of the individual. The experiences of disabled people are of the social restrictions in the world around them.” (John Swain in Disabling Barriers, Enabling Environments). In addition, disability art aimed to redress the imbalance of dominant, negative, and therefore disabling images that represent disabled people as the mythical, tragic, “other”. More recently however, some disability artists reconsidered the need for counteracting negative images with the positive, arguing that such images merely justify a mainstream need for “good” and “bad” norms of disability. In doing so, artists such as Ann Whitehurst, Jo Pearson, and Ju Gosling, reclaim stereotypical images in their work, confronting (often controversially) prejudiced attitudes. This reclamation of stereotypical representations has never been more confrontational or controversial than in the visual imagery of sexuality in disability art.

Before considering designated works from Whitehurst, Pearson, and Gosling, the social model concept must be revisited. While acknowledging the pivotal significance of this theory and the profound impact it has made globally for the disability movement and, subsequently, disability art, it is important to consider the underlying problem it exposes. Derived from feminist discourse, Jenny Morris in the seminal Pride Against Prejudice: Transforming Attitudes to Disability, poignantly critiques “…there is a tendency within the Social Model of disability to deny the experience of our own bodies, insisting that our physical differences and restrictions are entirely socially created…to suggest this is to deny the personal experience of physical or intellectual restrictions.” In this respect, taking into account both approaches to the concept of disability, the personal experience of sexuality can be ruminated through the work of each artist including collective experiences of stereotypical attitudes that disabled people encounter about their sexuality.

Sexual Control

Ann Whitehurst’s 1993 piece “Wheelchairbound” was produced at a time when the social model of disability became a universally recognized concept thus influencing policy and the 1995 Disability Discrimination Act. The work draws upon parallel images that correlate between stereotypical symbols of disability—the wheelchair and deviance related notions of disabled people as objects of fetish—identified by the corseted seat associated with sadomasochism. As a person who uses a wheelchair, Whitehurst represents its limitations or constraints and the sociosexual constraints sometimes enforced upon disabled people via the health and social care professions. In symbolizing restrictions in privacy and access to a confidential sexual life, often breached by everyday requirements of personal assistants, Whitehurst illustrates how a person’s physical disability limits their basic right to physical contact and intimacy, stating that she constantly seeks to “…develop her ideas and disrupt a patterning, society’s and her own” (Outside Centre, February 2002). Whitehurst instantly confronts the viewer with a stereotypical image of sexuality and disability while reinforcing the collective sexual desires of disabled people.

Most interestingly in this work, there is no depiction of the body, often used to reinforce society’s views of disability within the medical model, which places an emphasis on impairment itself and with it, notions of dependent, childlike asexuality. Reaffirming domination and control from S&M practice, the stereotype situates phrases in the piece like “power” and “powered chair” resolutely as a tool for identification and empowerment. Executed before the 1995 Disability Discrimination Act, but during the precedent intermediary period of the Direct Action Network’s first campaign for civil rights, Whitehurst reclaims fetishistic disability stereotypes in order to maintain complete control. Substituting the visually prominent corseted wheelchair as a focus for untold sexual desire, disavowal is rendered whereby, as Stuart Hall notes in Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, “…a powerful fascination or desire is both indulged and at the same time denied. It is where what has been tabooed nevertheless manages to find a displaced form of representation.”

Freaks and Fetishists

Jo Pearson is an award winning multimedia artist and producer for the BBC disability magazine program From the Edge, as well as for the highly acclaimed yet controversial 1995 film Freak Fucking Basics. It is a provocative documentary, examining the personal experience of disability, sexuality, and prejudice. Featuring actor, musician, and renowned disability performance artist Mat Fraser, this thirteen minute film, shot in black and white and color, relays between Mat’s own account of sexual stereotypes and connects to the performance of his accompanying song “Survival of the Shittiest” from the soundtrack Outsiders: “This songs about me you sex and the practice. Of having the libido of a normal sexuality. And with it confronting the straight worlds reality.”

Confronting the “straight worlds reality” indeed with his reclamation of stereotypical language, Mat tells us of previous involvement with S&M outsider clubs, highlighting dominant stereotypical prejudices of disabled people as objects of fetish belonging to the realms of what he calls sexual “low lives”. Not denying interest and gratification through S&M, he acknowledges a fact that Tom Shakespeare has noted in The Sexual Politics of Disability: Untold Desires, “Disabled people very commonly find themselves the focus of sexual interest from people who find their impairment titillating.” Alternatively and controversially from the subsequent complaints of many disabled women, Mat also confesses on film how he himself has slept with women who have various impairments in order to satisfy an inherent curiosity. Addressing his own sexual voyeurism, Mat challenges the viewer to consider their voyeuristic treatment of his body and sexuality.

The most intriguing aspect about this film must be Jo Pearson’s decision to represent the personal account of a disabled man’s sexual experience and not a woman’s. In many respects this could relate to notions of the similar sexual inequality and voyeurism placed upon nondisabled women with mainstream society and disabled men, stereotypically equivalent in passivity and dependence. Documenting the reflections of a disabled man who displays athletic prowess through martial arts, the film redefines society’s standards of masculinity and thus desirability primarily validated by athletics and sexuality. (Refer to Jodi O’Brien, Everyday Inequalities: Critical Inquiries.)

Similarly, multimedia Artist Ju Gosling continues this reference to fetishism and disability. Reinventing herself as a virtual work of art known as “Ju90” in cyberspace, Gosling’s “My-Not-So-Secret-Life as a Cyborg” explores the social construction of disability through performance art. Illustrated with various self-portraits deeply reminiscent of Frida Kahlo, she discusses issues surrounding identity, disability, and sexuality. In “Borg/Brace”, alter ego Ju90 turns her back to the viewer, presenting the custom made orthopaedic brace made of plastic (which Ju later had sprayed silver), covering the length of her spine fastened with nylon straps. Gosling presents herself as an object of fetish and voyeurism. Reasserting an ownership of the corset, she traps all personality in the brace so that she becomes assimilated within it. The fundamental feature throughout Gosling’s multimedia work is the significance placed on androgyny. With a reinvented virtual name, Ju90, Gosling disregards her real name Juliet, typically associated with tragedy and femininity, and replaces it for a condensed version referring to the 1960s animated character Jo 90. Likewise, this URL name gives no primary evidence of gender, identity, or sexuality, reinforcing an ambiguity. Commenting that her previous “…androgynous image had vanished” as soon as she began wearing the borg/brace, she also reiterates however, “…it exaggerated my femininity and impairment whilst conflating the two.” Intentionally custom designing the borg/brace with a ying/yang symbol and dolphin image marking the exact location where the spinal injury began, Ju depicts the point of “deformity” from personal signification and also a sense of sexual empowerment.

Ronda Gowland lives in the United Kingdom, England. She read Art and Design History at the Southampton Institute and completed her MA in Arts Management at the University of Portsmouth in 2004. Ronda's research interests are in disability art and disability studies.