The assumption of disabled people as being asexual further manifests in the material conditions of disabled people’s lives where economic discrimination and exclusion can reduce and deplete opportunities for sex, intimacy and love, and where their living conditions deny space for autonomy, agency and adulthood.

Issue arising from the assumption of disabled people as being asexual - (2)

 The ways that the assumption of disabled people as always already asexual has led to processes of desexualization, including denial of access to sexual assistance, contraception and sexual education, and a lack of access to opportunities for sexual engagement in institutional settings. 

Issue arising from the assumption of disabled people as being asexual - (1)

There is a presumed assumption that people with disabilities are always already asexual – an assumption that further relies on impressions of disabled people as inevitably undesiring and undesirable.

Pepperdine University

Disabled and sexual-embodied subjectivities are much more than ‘asexual’ or ‘hypersexual’ pathological constructions. A greater attention to the
phenomenology of sexual embodiment, pleasure, desire, and the diverse meanings of
intimacy and the erotic can make significant contributions to social and scholarly analyses of disability and sexuality.

Disability and sexuality: Desires and pleasures

Loeser, C., Pini, B., & Crowley, V. (2018). Disability and sexuality: Desires and pleasures. Sexualities, 21(3), 255–270. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363460716688682


In 2013, there have been calls for sexual assistance to be included in the
lists of services offered to Australians with a disability (Yau, 2013: 1).

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