Disabling Sex: Inventing a People who are Missing
Disabling Sex: Inventing a People who are Missing
This chapter investigates how discourses on disability may assist the reconsideration of Deleuze’s understanding of sexual pleasure. Deleuze critiques the hierarchal organisation of bodies and their facialisation through social, political and gendered functions, and yet, a closer look at the rerouting of sexual pleasures of anomalous bodies suggests that his rejection of the orgasm rests also on ableist assumptions about how bodies work. Employing Deleuzian concepts such as becoming and faciality, this chapter analyses the ‘disabling’ of sexuality, that is, the way that sexual pleasure is hijacked by cultural, political, commercial and medical discourses. At the same time, reading Deleuze through discourses on disability makes it possible to ask if bodies that, in different ways, fail to function according to predetermined standards can express more productive relations between the orgasm and the body than the one Deleuze envisions.
Keywords: Disability, Anomalous bodies, Functionality, Normality, Medicalization, Minor literature, Faciality
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