ABSTRACT

This chapter offers the theoretical, intellectual and political context to the sociological research. It concentrates on the problems and possibilities in theorising disability. The chapter positions the social model of disability as an inadequate analytical tool with which to explore disabled sexualities, and argues for an alternative, embodied conceptualisation of disablement. It considers the re/makings of sexual bodies and selves, drawing upon biological essentialism, discourse and the role of power, and forms of interactionism and script theory to question what these offer to a sexual politics of disability. The chapter imagines otherwise through queer theory and crip theory, asking not only where one ends and the other begins, but questioning their ability to forge out a new sexual politics of disability that speaks to the everyday lived lives of disabled people. It concludes by questioning whether critical social theories, as currently constructed, can adequately theorise the lived, embodied and material realities of disabled people's sexual, intimate and erotic lives.