- Thinking Sexuality and Dis/ability Together
Michael Gill
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. xvii + 255 pp.
Michael Gill opens his book about intellectual disability, sexual ableism, and sexual agency with several personal stories of disability—one of the stories he found himself able to tell in a graduate seminar in disability studies, and the others not. The story he tells is about his own experience working in a sheltered workshop, a supervised workplace for people with developmental and intellectual disabilities. Although only just out of high school himself, Gill found himself authorized as an able-bodied employee of the sheltered workshop to regulate the behavior of the intellectually disabled people working there. Gill explains that his authority went beyond regulating work efficiency to regulating the sexual expression of individuals under his supervision. As Gill notes, “Sexual activity was policed based on assumptions about not only when and where one can be sexual, but also who can be sexual” (xv).
There are many assumptions about sexuality in relation to disabled people, stemming from a commonly held belief among nondisabled people that the disabled are not or cannot be sexual and, relatedly, that they do not experience sexual desire. In the case of intellectually disabled people, there is also often a perception of their sexuality as childlike and inappropriate. Gill calls this denial of sexual pleasure and agency to intellectually disabled people “sexual ableism,” a term he glosses as “the system of imbuing sexuality with determinations of qualification to be sexual based on criteria of ability, morality, physicality, appearance, age, race, social acceptability, and gender conformity” (3). The concept of sexual ableism suggests the importance of thinking the experiences and events of sexuality and [End Page 151] dis/ability together as “especially dense transfer point[s] for relations of power,” as Michel Foucault (1978: 103) would say. Gill joins a growing group of scholars, including Eli Clare, Mel Chen, Alison Kafer, Robert McRuer, and Margrit Shildrick, interested in articulating critical disability studies with queer and sexuality studies.
The personal stories Gill was not able to tell suggest something about how dis/ability operates affectively on the self and the social. Gill describes a memory of visiting a state fair when he was six or seven and being transfixed with both curiosity and fear when he notices that a child about his own age has to be fed by her mother. His last story explains that he had not realized that a beloved babysitter was intellectually disabled until his parents told him only after he had reached adulthood. These opening vignettes set the scene for Gill’s approach throughout Already Doing It. On the one hand, he uses particular stories to think through the complex issues he takes up in the book—about consent and competency, about reproduction and parenting, about sex education and representations of sexuality and intellectual disability in media and popular culture. On the other, they indicate his desire to get beyond a rights-based framework for understanding the perception of the social burden of disability on nondisabled people in order to explore what I would call the conditionality of disabled subjectivity, or the way experiences and events of disability illuminate the conditionality of subjectivity itself.
Gill, who has a PhD in disability studies and is now an assistant professor of disability studies at Syracuse, is particularly good at grappling with the complexity—and, indeed, messiness—of the cases he explores. I found myself excited by the prospect of teaching his work in my undergraduate classes on disability studies and gender and sexuality studies. His writing is pedagogical in the best sense of the word, opening up rather than closing off avenues for exploration of difficult topics. In his chapter on media representations of intellectual disability, he explains that he resists “the temptation to code certain images as ‘positive’ and ‘negative’” (171), and I would argue that this ability to suspend critical judgment is the strength of the work as a whole and will make it a text that helps us reflect on other current and future cases, like that of Anna Stubblefield, the Rutgers philosophy professor convicted...