Abeer Shrivastava, Week 2

Analysis of "How Young People with Disabilities Conceptualise The Body, Sex and Marriage in Urban India: Four Case Studies” by Renu Addlakha and "Compulsory Able- Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence” by Robert McRuer

Both the articles initiate their arguments by drawing a parallelism between the sexuality of able-bodied people and that of those who are differently abled. Renu Addlakha talks about how the differently abled people are viewed with a certain sense of sympathy, which consequently makes it comparatively way more difficult for them to find sexual partners. Stating the experiences of some case studies, the author tries draw a pattern which suggests that people with disabilities tend to search for people with similar disabilities as their partners. This significantly limits their scope of finding sexual partners. Moreover, differently abled people display a certain resistance towards assistance, which is one of the reasons for making them feel alienated from the majority of the able- bodied society which might make them undervalue themselves. The idea of intersectionality comes into play when female differently abled individuals are supposed to acquaint themselves with the idea of sex. They have layers of oppression on their heads, which again narrows their prospects with sexual activities. Robert McRuer analyses how the concept of sexuality is primarily that of heterosexuality, thus it is often assumed by the society that differently able bodied people must be heterosexual as well. The mere idea of homosexuality within the differently abled community is revolutionary as such, which again begs the question of intersectionality acting up in this community. The “burden" of being differently abled as well as that of being queer has a combined stress on individuals. In both the articles, the root cause of these pre conceived notions has been identified as the hegemony of compulsory heterosexuality.