Description:
This article examines depictions of disabled sex as mediated by normative representations of sexual performance and popular images of disability. It analyzes the ways in which disabled intimacies become encoded for mainstream reception through adaptation strategies that adjust disabled sexuality to a normative representational demand. Contextualizing recent popular images of disabled sex with studies on representing disability in popular media, the article shows how, despite the emergence of a new disability paradigm, the experience of sex and sexuality by people with disabilities becomes aesthetically subjugated to the ‘tyranny of the normal’. The author provides an insight into narrative strategies of the popular as well as examining methods used for relating disability and sex in popular culture. The article also advocates for the extension of popular narrative codes to ensure a more inclusive depiction of sexual pleasures, which although deemed ‘disabled’ are, nevertheless, erotic.