The Intersection of Gender, Disability, and Sexuality: Challenging Ableist and Normative Codes

Andrea García-Santesmases is an Associate Professor at the Department of Social Work at National Distance Education University (UNED, Spain). Her main lines or research are the intersections between gender and sexuality studies and critical disability studies. She has several publications in this field, last one the book “El cuerpo deseado: la conversación pendiente entre feminismo y anticapacitismo” (The desired body: the urgent conversation between feminism and anti-ableism).

This paper explores the interrelation between gender, disability, and sexuality, highlighting how ableist norms shape the construction of identities and desires. The category of disability often obscures gender, placing individuals in a space of liminality. This position generates responses of hyper-femininity—linked to physical appearance, caregiving roles, or professional achievement—and hyper-masculinity—presenting oneself as hypersexual or hyper-competent—but it also opens fissures that allow us to understand gender as a learned and repeated performance, destabilized through interference or dissidence. Disability, in this sense, reveals how gender technologies rely on bodily control that is not available to everyone, exposing the artificial nature of norms of femininity and masculinity.

In a complementary way, the paper examines social imaginaries surrounding the sexuality of people with disabilities, often represented as different from the “normative” and marked by lack. The most common institutional responses have oscillated between therapeutic approaches and rights-based discourses, but both present limitations, particularly for those who cannot express or materialize their desire. Against these representations, it is proposed to understand such experiences as a sexual minority capable of questioning established codes of intimacy, roles of passivity and activity, and the exclusion of prostheses or non-normative bodies from sexual practices.

Nevertheless, the fact that a sexuality is stigmatized does not necessarily imply that it is transgressive. For this reason, the paper emphasizes the need for a feminist perspective that highlights how many claims tend to legitimize male desire more easily, often positioning women in the role of service providers. Furthermore, it problematizes the myth of asexuality, which functions as a mechanism of oppression by denying the possibility of living asexuality as a legitimate identity and experience. Overall, it is argued that gender and sexuality in disability should not be understood solely as fields of exclusion, but also as spaces from which to make visible the fissures of normativity and to rethink the diverse ways in which bodies are embodied and lived.