ABSTRACT
This chapter identifies that friendship and relationships are critical for intellectually disabled people. It considers sexual politics and intellectual disability, the emotional and psycho-social, lie at the heart of relations, the self and a care ethics model. The chapter wonders how the self exists in relation to another in particular circumstances and how a care ethics model of disability might support care-full relations. Discourses and representations of, and commentaries about, intellectually disabled people and their sexual and intimate life are pervasive. Subsequently, to understand sexual and relationship politics through the lens of violence, infantilisation and exclusion is critical. It is the infantilisation of intellectually disabled people, or indeed their dehumanisation, that aids systemic violence and exclusion within social, community and political life. This emotional, practical and socio-political caring lack has been evidenced over the decades, as individualism erodes humanity and caring spaces. It sees that these are governed via the politics of sex education which goes beyond parental decision-making processes.
