ABSTRACT
Discussion of sex, love, and disability is complicated by various factors. People with disabilities face various kinds of discrimination, are disproportionately the targets of sexual misconduct and violence, and are often not seen as romantic partners. Sometimes an emphasis on sexuality or surrogacy is seen as conflicting with an emphasis on intimacy and love. In their 1996 edited collection, The Sexual Politics of Disability, Tom Shakespeare, Kath Gillespie-Sells and Dominic Davies point to a wide range of scholarship showing how people with disabilities have long been seen as either asexual or “malignantly” sexual. The “social model” of disability challenges the idea of disability as a medical condition that makes a person inherently worse off and replaces it with an understanding of disability as seen through the lens of social oppression. Kevin Mintz points out those romantic relationships between disability-related professionals and their clients develop with “relative frequency,” and that families “sometimes have trouble accepting those relationships”.
