“Like, pissing yourself is not a particularly attractive quality, let’s be honest” : learning to contain through youth, adulthood, disability and sexuality

In this article, we (re)conceptualise containment in the context of youth, gender, disability, crip sex/uality and pleasure. We begin by exploring eugenic histories of containment and trace the ways in which the anomalous embodiment of disabled people (Shildrick, 2009) remains vigorously policed within current neo-eugenic discourse. Drawing upon data from two corresponding research studies, we bring the lived experiences of disabled young people to the fore. We explore their stories of performing, enacting and realising containment: containing the posited unruliness of the leaky impaired body; containment as a form of (gendered) labour (Liddiard, 2013a); containment as a marker of normalisation and sexualisation, and thus a necessary component for ableist adulthood (Slater, 2015). Thus, we theorise crip embodiment as permeable, porous and thus problematic in the context of the impossibly bound compulsory (sexually) able adult body (McRuer, 2006). We suggest that the implicit learning of containment is therefore required of disabled young people, particularly women, to counter infantilising and desexualising discourse and cross the 'border zone of youth' (Lesko, 2012) and achieve normative neoliberal adulthood. Crucially, however, we examine the meaning of what we argue are important moments of messiness: the precarious localities of leakage which disrupt containment and thus the 'reality' of the 'able' 'adult' body. We conclude by considering the ways in which these bodily ways of being contour both material experiences of pleasure and the right(s) to obtain it

'I never felt like she was just doing it for the money': Disabled men's intimate (gendered) realities of purchasing sexual pleasure and intimacy

Scholarly enquiry into the interrelationships of disability and commercial sex remains seriously under-represented within disability and sexuality research. This article, however, draws upon the sexual stories of heterosexual disabled men in order to explore their embodied realities of purchasing of sex, pleasure and intimacy from non-disabled female sex workers. A thematic analysis of these sexual stories revealed multiple and complex motivations for, and experiences of, purchasing of sex, pleasure and intimacy; a purchase ultimately shaped by men’s social and political positioning as disabled and, as with the motivations and experiences of heterosexual non-disabled men, by discourses of hegemonic masculinity and heteronormative sexuality. Given the dearth of research in this area, a number of questions are identified which make important contributions to transdisciplinary knowledges of disabled sexualities, commercial sex work and disabled sexual citizenship