Natalie M. Chin (CUNY School of Law) has posted The Structural Desexualization of Disability (Columbia Law Review, Vol. 124, No. 6 (2024)) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Sexuality is integral to the human experience. Yet choices related to sexuality—sex, intimate relationships, marriage, pleasure, and childbearing—are often controlled for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Discourse on sexuality primarily focuses on acts of sexual violence against this community, emphasizing a victim– perpetrator binary. This binary view directs legal and policy efforts to ameliorate this sexual violence, emphasizing victimhood and protectionism.
But individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities— like members of the broader population—desire to experience love and intimacy; engage in sexual pleasure and self-expression; and exercise choices around sexuality and reproduction. Legal scholarship has undertheorized how state systems that are central in the lives of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities normalize the subjugation of sexual and reproductive choices.
This Article fills this void by applying a new structural desexualization of disability framework to identify the ways that legal structures and social norms act in concert to harm people with intellectual and developmental disabilities in matters of sexuality. This Article examines three disability systems through this new framework: guardianship, special education, and the Home and Community-Based Services Waiver Program.
This is the first legal Article to situate the structural desexualization of disability as a constitutive element in perpetuating sexual violence against people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. This Article aims to encourage discourse, advocacy, policymaking, and organizing around issues that affect sexuality by reframing the victim– perpetrator binary. It further seeks to reposition sexuality as a community integration priority under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Recommended.