Disabled Bodies

• in everyday life, our bodies are absent, not because we do not pay attention to what they experience, but precisely because we do experience them as absent: “experiences of bodily absence” 
• Health is the silent body, and illness is the body made apparent:
• The advent of AIDS […] has literally made the body of the gay male an object of massive public curiosity and relentless cultural inquiry. His body is now widely perceived as a site of mysterious and fatal infections—a perception that has prompted its radical (re)othering and (re)medicalizing. The body has emerged as a supertext, a territory over which a bewildering number of competing medical, political, and cultural fictions seek domination. (Nelson 2)
• THE GAY MALE CLONE: strong link exists (pre-AIDS)between being gay and taking care of one's body: going to the gym is an integral part of the gay urban lifestyle; gyms are places that are as important to gay neighborhoods as bars, discos and bathhouses. 
• the phrase “gym body” was so frequent that when it was used in the telegraphic language of personal ads, there was a great risk for it to be subject to different interpretations

• “Gym bodies” were ideals that were pursued by those who claimed the status of “gay clones,

• glorified as the body of the gay male was, its relatively untamable nature heralds its deliquescence resulting from AIDS, which will take place barely a few years later.

• AIDS CHANGED THE GAY MALE BODY

• going to the gym still takes up a lot of gay men's time---The Clone Classic was found in gyms, discos, and on Fire Island. […] The New Clone could be found at the gym, at ACT UP meetings, at Queer Nation demonstrations, and on Fire Island.

• But the function of such intense activity has changed dramatically: “In the age of anxiety gay men go to the gym five nights a week, just to keep out of trouble. […] Any way to sublimate desire; anything to avoid sex” 

• The goal is reversed: before AIDS, he went to the gym to have a body that would trigger desire; after AIDS has hit his community, he goes to the gym in order to tame his desire. 

• 
  Crotches are not artificially padded any more, hips and butts are, which would have been considered heresy a few years earlier. 

• The idea is still to control one's body, to sculpt it, but the other way around: muscle has turned into fat. And the goal is still not to be the odd one out. 

• Before AIDS, the desire to look like every other gay man could be considered to stem from aesthetic concerns only, since he views the “clone style” as a subversive affirmation of gay identity. But once AIDS has settled in the community and profoundly modified the way the gay male body is viewed, it is easily understandable that what is at stake is fear. 

• The object of this fear is stigmatization--“Everyone had a good ten pounds to spare, as if ten pounds could protect one from death”. Fear is not triggered by other people's eyes, but by one's own eyes on one's own body. It is not about looking exactly like the others, it is about not looking like some others, those who have AIDS. (Uniformity persists, but it does not stem from a will to dissociate oneself from the straight population; it is the result of the will not to be associated with those whose weight loss they cannot control).
• Describing the AIDS Body 
• Emaciation and pain are the two descriptives which run through the charachterization of the AIDS body     

• While the issue of looks was central to the construction of gay identity, with AIDS, it is linked with the preservation of one's identity, since in the case of such an epidemic there is a great risk to fall into anonymity. 
•  Like concentration Camp Victims: what AIDS and the Holocaust have in common (and this is the reason why such a comparison is frequent, even though it is risky) is the notion of anonymity, of loss of one's personal identity. All those young men dying of AIDS can end up looking alike, like all extermination camps prisoners, all slaves, all detainees. 

“People telling their illness stories do not simply describe their sick bodies; their bodies give their stories their particular shape and direction”. In the gay literature of AIDS, and in pathographies in general, the body is not only the theme, it is the source and the structuring principle of the creative act. And what is at stake is the issue of identity, and the peril it incurs in sickness 

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Sex and Disability

• Disability is a pervasive cultural system of stigmatization which stigmatizes certain kinds of body variations--the system excludes kinds of bodily forms, functions, impairments, changes, or ambiguities that call into question our cultural fantasy (ideal) of the body as a neutral, compliant instrument.
• system for interpreting and disciplining bodily variation
• relationship between bodies and their environment
• a set of practices that produce the able-bodied and the disabled
• a way of describing inherent instability of the embodied self 
• a way of disadvantaging people by devaluing bodies that do not conform to cultural standards.
• ability system preserves and values normal beautiful bodies
• the female body as disabled
• Circassian beauties versus the Hottentot Venus
• Disability and Gender
• Differential stigmatization and gender
• men
• emasculation
• passive
• dependent 
• frail
• diminutive
• concerns: erection
• compensation: virile, athletic, career success
• women
• desexualized
• passive
• dependent
• frail
• diminutive
• concerns: ability to be a caregiver
• compensation: attractiveness, children, homemaker
• BOTH ARE desexualized, but not in the same way.
• QUEER DISABILITY and SEXUALITY 

MYTHS SURROUNDING the DESEXUALIZATION of the DISABLED

• Lead to sexual abuse of the disbaled and the nonreporting of this abuse
• “disabled people can’t and don’t form close relationships with other people,”
• adolescents with disabilities’ lives may either “deprive them of sexual education or provide them with inadequate information that doesn’t address their specific risk factors” 
• Among queer and/or trans teens, the lack of information about sexual identity and gender identity can contribute to feelings of isolation, an increase in depression risk and other mental health conditions
• by not providing specific information of the biological mechanics behind the spread of sexually transmitted infections and the behaviors that cause pregnancy, disabled teens may not be able to identify early warnings signs of either STIs or pregnancy
• “If we can be rendered sexless, neutered, inert, and nonthreatening, it can be made clear that here lies yet another difference between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ another reminder that we are not quite fully human,” 
• People seem genuinely shocked and unsettled by the sight of disabled people in sexual relationships, by disabled artists and performers who use their sexuality as part of their acts, by arts projects that celebrate sexy disabled bodies and challenge conventional attitudes about what kind of body is ‘sexy.’
• Expressions of sensuality and sexuality from the disabled community are sometimes painted as repulsive, as something that makes people feel uncomfortable. 

FILM: Burlesque and Banned Bodies