Bad Bedfellows: Disability Sex Rights and Viagra

Abstract

The disability rights movement grounds material critiques of the treatment of people with disabilities in a social constructionist perspective, locating disability in the social rather than physical realm, and demedicalizing the concept of disability. However, this conceptualization is threatened by the medicalization of nonnormative erections as the biomedical pathology erectile dysfunction (ED). Although use of medical treatments for ED can have positive outcomes for individuals, the medical community's tendency to include sexual difference in the rubric of disability threatens to remedicalize that category. Furthermore, medicalized conceptions of ED often serve to refocus sexuality around phallocentric, normative sex acts and gender roles, undoing the deconstructive work of disability sex studies. Finally, although aging Western populations targeted for ED treatment represent potentially expanded bases for disability movement activism, the pathologizing of nonnormative sexuality may have the power to instead focus this group on individualistic use of medical interventions geared toward “normalcy.”