Devoteeism

In Spencer Williams’ article, “Are Disability Fetishists Exploiting People with Disabilities?” (2016), he discusses his feelings regarding disability fetishism (also known as Devoteeism), as a man with cerebral palsy. He concludes that although there is some benefit of being wanted sexually in a society that considers disability as an inherent weakness, fetishizing disabled people as objects of desire has the potential to be grossly problematic. This fetishism produces discourse surrounding what is acceptable when discussing disabled identity in tandem with kink communities. For the purposes of this essay, I will explore how the formulation of the normative has led to both the pathologization of physical disability and to kink more broadly

Within Devoteeism, the portrayal of disabled women misrepresents and praises them for their fragility, vulnerability and (almost) contradictory capacity to “overcome” adversity, by Devotees, a group made up primarily of able-bodied men. This archetype of the disabled body is a reproduction of the normative body, taken to the extreme. As discussed in “Narrative Prosthesis”, the authors suggest that “the narrative deployment of disability hinges on the identification of physical and cognitive differences as mutable categories of cultural investment.” (P. 16). Within our culture, we misconstrue disability to be a non-sexual identity because the physical impairment within bodies can render them to be incapable of normative sex, which is subsequently interpreted through ableism as an incapacity to have normative desire. In the Devoteeism community, instead of de-sexualizing the disabled body, this community gathers around the idea of the “grotesqueness” of the disabled body, as an object of desire, wherein physical impairment is a hypersexual site of

Historically, with the construction of normalcy, femininity was considered as opposition to the ideal body, i.e. the masculine, able form. Drawing from Lennard J. Davis’ article, “Constructing normalcy: The bell curve, the novel, and the invention of the disabled body in the nineteenth century”, he attempts to map the construction of normalcy by beginning with the formulation of the ideal body. He cites the multiple artworks based around the goddess Venus, as the ideal body, are unattainable by humans (p. 4). What he finds, is that these masterpieces were created by taking the best body parts of existing women and arranging and compiling them into one perfect physique. This is important because the construction of femininity in this situation, is inherently rooted in creating able-bodied, cisgender women as the ideal sexual object, even though no woman is the “ideal”. He argues, no woman can be the ideal, and disabled female bodies are thus rendered grotesque. This is significant. In relation to Devoteeism, disabled women are already being regarded with preconceived notions of what the ideal body should be. This means that the construct of femininity is already considered inherently flawed. To construct the non-normative as objects of sexual desire serves as a beginning point to map the complicated hypersexualization of the feminine disabled