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Dis-orienting Paraphilias? Disability, Desire, and the Question of (Bio)Ethics

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Abstract

In 1977 John Money published the first modern case histories of what he called ‘apotemnophilia’, literally meaning ‘amputation love’ [Money et al., The Journal of Sex Research, 13(2):115–12523, 1977], thus from its inception as a clinically authorized phenomenon, the desire for the amputation of a healthy limb or limbs was constituted as a sexual perversion conceptually related to other so-called paraphilias. This paper engages with sex-based accounts of amputation-related desires and practices, not in order to substantiate the paraphilic model, but rather, because the conception of these (no doubt) heterogeneous desires and practices as symptoms of a paraphilic condition (or conditions) highlights some interesting cultural assumptions about ‘disability’ and ‘normalcy’, their seemingly inherent (un)desirability, and their relation to sexuality. In critically interrogating the socio-political conditions that structure particular desires and practices such that they are lived as improper, distressing and/or disabling, the paper constitutes an exercise in what Margrit Shildrick [Beyond the body of bioethics: Challenging the conventions. In M. Shildrick and R. Mykitiuk (Eds.), Ethics of the body: Postconventional challenges (pp. 1–26). New York: MIT Press, 2005] refers to as “postconventional ethics”.

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Notes

  1. Peter Singer is probably the best known proponent of what I will refer to throughout this paper as normative bioethics. See [23–25].

  2. Both Blanchard and Lawrence claim that so-called homosexual MTFs “tend to naturally resemble persons with the embodiment or status they desire (i.e. women)”, and that “this natural resemblance provides an obvious rationale for sex reassignment surgery” ([16], p. 266).

  3. There are derogatory terms such as ‘rice queen’, ‘snow queen’, ‘sticky rice’, ‘coconut’, and so on that are used to refer to forms and practices of desire presumed to be ‘race’-based, and other than ideal. However, such terms are found primarily in sub-cultural communities and are not institutionally authorised in the same way or to the same extent that medicalised (pathologising) terms are.

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  1. Department of Critical and Cultural Studies, Macquarie University, North Ryde, NSW, 2109, USA

    Nikki Sullivan

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Sullivan, N. Dis-orienting Paraphilias? Disability, Desire, and the Question of (Bio)Ethics. Bioethical Inquiry 5, 183–192 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11673-008-9097-2

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