ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the complicated history of disability and sexuality on screen—from more recent blockbusters and television shows, like The Sessions (2012) and The Theory of Everything (2014), to films about returning war veterans, which sought to convince women to marry, care for and build families with disabled ex-servicemen, eugenics films of the 1930s, which posed that the desires and sexual activities of people with disabilities imperilled the nation, and women’s pictures from the mid-century, which fetishised the sexual violation of women with disabilities and connected love to cure. Connecting to recent scholarship on disability and film, this discussion is grounded in considerations of film industry practices and narrative and representational strategies, including de facto and official forms of censorship; shifting legal and medical outlooks on disability, particularly in conjunction with eugenic ideology; and overlapping social histories of sexuality, gender and race.
(film, disability, sexuality, love)
