DISABLING SEX: Notes for a Crip Theory of Sexuality

This article attempts to “think disability” using the theoretical framework laid out by Gayle Rubin in her 1984 essay “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality.” After considering how Rubin's essay was already arguably engaged with a disability politics (or, more broadly, a politics of embodiment), it reads “Thinking Sex” alongside another 1984 text, Deborah A. Stone's book The Disabled State, arguing that Stone's text, like Rubin's, is concerned with how capitalism sorts bodies and behaviors into dominant and subordinated categories. The Disabled State, however, can also be read as anticipating, from a disability studies perspective, queer analyses (such as Licia Fiol-Matta's book A Queer Mother for the Nation or Jasbir K. Puar's Terrorist Assemblages) that do not emerge until much later—analyses stressing the uneven biopolitical incorporation of seemingly marginalized subjects into the contemporary state. The article concludes with reflections on sex surrogacy and the Netherlands, using that location as an exemplary site for examining the complex and contradictory position of disability and sex in relation to the contemporary state.