ABSTRACT
The notion of sexuality has been problematised by critical cultural and queer theory to the extent that critical disability studies (CDS) acknowledges the need to complicate the sociopolitical assertion that disabled people have the same rights as others to sexual identity and expression. The move towards postmodernism in CDS is often met with external scepticism, but it has felt as though this is the area in which some of the most exciting new theoretical work is being done. The initial question that must concern all those engaged with disability issues is why in the era of postmodernity, when multiple geopolitical insecurities are writ large and our individual expectations of the future are at best ambivalent, the societies of the global north should be so unsettled by non-normative forms of embodiment. Speaking of disability in theoretical terms, then, must both respond to, and critique, the power and simplicity of binary thinking.
