Disabled women looking for sex
Another powerful archetype, Tom Shakespeare says, is the unconscious – and sometimes conscious – attitude surrounding reproductive fitness that suggests having a disabled partner is potentially contaminating as it could pass the ‘problem’ on to the next generation.
Disabled people have challenged this on many levels: for example, sexual relations are not all about procreation, not all impairments are inheritable, and many disabled people accept their impairment and the possibility that it might be passed on.
By the end of World War II, it is estimated that some 200,000 people with disabilities had been murdered.
The disability movement first started to challenge those attitudes in the USA in the mid-to-late 1960s.
One of the best examples is in William Shakespeare’s Richard III, who is written as twisted in body and mind or, as he says of himself, “rudely stamped” and rendered impotent by his physical limitations.
Students were also key to this new civil rights battle.
Deaf (with a capital D) people, for example, consider deafness to be a culture, rather than an impairment, and believe it should be embraced and celebrated.
With eugenics – a now-discredited social philosophy – Francis Galton pursued the theory of contamination to its logical end.
By 1914 nearly two-thirds of US states had made it illegal for “feeble-minded” and “insane” people to marry.
The so-called ‘Ugly Laws’, first passed in the 1880s, prohibited the “unsightly” from being seen on the street at all. The legitimisation of eugenic views throughout Europe and America ended in a logical, if horrifying, outcome: the systematic murder of thousands of disabled people in Germany after the Nazis came to power in 1933.