ABSTRACT
Participation in Trinidad and Tobago Carnival has often been framed as the fait accompli for enjoying sexual freedom. This chapter contextualises the anxieties and manoeuvrings of sexually transgressive people, often denied sexual expression. My interlocutors are four women with physical disabilities, all of whom are in sexual relationships. Two of them are married, living with their spouses, and two in visiting relationships—where, in one case, the infrequent visitor is their married partner. Their narratives reveal how historically framed social practices concerning disability and sex have leaked into the contemporary era. I interrogate and disclose the personal tactics of these women, sometimes obscured by the sexual dominance exhibited by familial non-disabled others. Triangulating feminist ethnographic techniques, I used face-to-face in-depth interviews, travel diaries and “becoming mobile,” an ethnographic-inspired technique of accompanying research participants as they traverse their communities. Using the theoretical notion of mobility-as-occupation, a kind of sense-of-capability, I examine the strategic approaches and disruptions my interlocutors experience towards sexual expression, as an occupation. Revealing formal and informal controls over sexuality, this chapter explicates threats to sexual justice using the lens of occupational apartheid, unearthing everyday implications to sexual deprivation, alienation, marginalisation and imbalance.
(disability, mobility impairment, occupation, sexual justice, occupational apartheid, ethnographic techniques, intersectionality, Carnival, Trinidad and Tobago)
