Autostraddle
by Tovah
“I’ve had people think weird things about my sexuality that are absolutely connected to my disability, but the experience was not that I had no sexuality — it was that I had a fucked up sexuality,” says Lyric Seal aka Neve Be, a queercrip writer, performance artist and adult film star, in an interview for Autostraddle. “Many people who work in disability and sexuality media want to make the goal: let’s sexualize disabled people; let’s make sure they know that they have bodies. I’m like, no, it’s more complicated than that.”
Why is it that when navigating experiences of sexual marginalization, we are so often pressured into traps of disavowal? To disclaim, dismiss and deny the messy, fleshy trails our bodies followed before and may seek to travel again? When encountering questions of sex and disability, the overemphasis on whether or not crips have been either desexualized or hypersexualized is a necessary and important social critique, and yet it also enforces the notion that the experience of crip sex only offers insight into the experience of discrimination. Put simply: even within the most sexually progressive circles, people with disabilities are rarely considered experts on anything other than ableism — let alone how to fuck and get fucked.
What follows, then, is a conversation meant to move beyond the erosive architecture of “do they/don’t they”; a conversation bigger than the over-rehearsed scripts about disability and sexuality that lead to predictable, shallow conclusions about oppression and embodiment. Conclusions that measure the worth of disabled people by their capacity to reinstate norms from the periphery rather than provide alternative knowledge from the center.
Wheelchairs, specifically, hold tremendous symbolic power. As the representative icon of disability in an ableist world, the body of the wheelchair (and its user) is overwhelmingly associated with abjection and otherness. Exploring the erotic significance of wheelchairs, though, is not a reactionary move toward inclusion, but an opportunity to refuse the limited choices available for sexual narration. To willingly inhabit a space abandoned by ableism, negated by ableism, so as to disorganize the definitional power of ableism.
To do so, I spoke with three queercrip wheelchair users — Seal (HARLOT Magazine, Slumber Party Series), Stella Palikarova (Deliciously Disabled ) and Bethany Stevens (Crip Confessions) about the meanings of partnership, service, touch, pain, fantasy and more.
Autostraddle: How does romance or sex factor into your relationship with your wheelchair?
Bethany Stevens: My wheelchair is a sexually assistive aid, which sounds like a clinical way to say I try to fuck it and fuck in it. Despite my efforts to figure out how to penetrate myself with bits of it, it never works with the angles of my vagina and the parts of my chair. It works wonderfully to assist in sexual activities with others, people can lean their legs on my chair while I penetrate various body parts. My large wheels are taller than my seat, so people can lean on them as they straddle me so they are not bearing weight on my body.
Lyric Seal: I have two chairs. The power chair is named Gianna and she is metallic Barbie pink. She’s a high crip femme. She is hot and fast and yet a subtle performer. My other chair is Michelangelo. He is more of a lost boy and we’ve adventured for nine years together, so I treat him with a lot of respect. And while I do involve him in the sexual things I do, he’s not a sex toy to me. And someone else cannot use him in the same way that I use him. We can use him as an assistive device in our moment, and we can also use him as a sexy device, but he’s my partner, not someone else’s partner. My relationship to him has been really romantic.
Stella Palikarova: I always refer to my wheelchair as female because she’s fast and efficient. I try to think about ways to make her sexy or ways to make being in the chair sexy. Lap dances are great.
Stevens: I also dance a fair amount, with my chair being stroked as part of erotic dancing. This seems to be titillating to other people, and I think that may be true because the wheelchair frame serves as a visual genital surrogate for my partners — they feel stroked when my hands graze up and down my frame.
Seal: I have choreographed duets and dance pieces with my chair that are primarily about some kind of eternal service relationship. What does it mean to always have an imbalanced relationship or always have a function for someone? People who identify as service bottoms or service tops love that. And I think that being able to anthropomorphize my chair in that way has been really helpful to me in imagining that it doesn’t have to be a burden for someone to be eternally in service to someone else.
Palikarova: You can also incorporate the wheelchair into part of your foreplay. Not everyone transfers out of their wheelchairs for sexual activity based on their disability. For many people the wheelchair is the site of their sexual pleasure. Personally, I like to incorporate the chair into role-play. Like if my chair is my throne or my chariot and my partner is worshiping me in it. I remember playing a sexy game once where my partner’s head was not allowed to be higher than mine. That was fun! …