Disability Devotees In History

By disability devotees we mean those people who have - in normal sense rather unusual - intense sexual desire for someone suffering from some sort of disability. In what may look strange to many, these devotees are particularly aroused by people just because they have a disability. These devotees are mostly men who are attracted to disabled women, but there are many instances where women devotees are attracted to disabled men as well.

It is of little significance if the disability is major or profound. A minor disability in the form of missing fingers and major ones such as amputation or blindness - both can cause sexual attraction among devotees. This attraction to disability in devotees can be termed as an interest in different aspects of disability which takes a sexual form. Among these disability devotees, normal human sexuality may transform into a kind of sexual fetishism.

This phenomenon, however, is not a new one and has quite a long history. One can even trace hints of the presence this attraction to disability to the times of Greek philosopher Herodotus. In a direct or allusive way, we find reference to disability devotees in the works of renowned writers, artists and filmmakers such as Bruegel the Elder, de Brantôme, de Montaigne, Bertolt Brecht, Alexander Pushkin, Brecht, Salvador Dalí, Earnest Hemingway, Mayakovsky, von Stroheim, Helmut Newton and Buñuel. Even classical Vietnamese legends tell us of this attraction. The tradition of Chinese foot binding is another example.

If we look at the history of disability devotees, we find that this type of human sexual attraction has become more well-known over the past hundred years or so because of various factors, such as Interwar decadence, the Sexual Revolution, and of course, the arrival of the Internet. Several creative personalities have portrayed this attraction. For example, drama producer Andriy Zholdak has produced plays with disabled people, sculptor Marc Quinn has sculpted statues of them, photographers Gerhard Aba, Petrina Hicks, Eric Kroll, Ronald Parisi, Romain Slocombe and Yury Solomko have portrayed them, filmmakers have directed movies like Um crime delicado. Chinese balletomanes produce dance performances with them and it is a regular feature in Japanese anime and manga.

So such a sexual attraction is no longer taboo, but is now a part of recognized mainstream culture, with small informal networks of disability devotees. In the early part of the 20th century, a subculture of disability fetishism developed mostly through correspondence. In the 1930s, some popular magazines broached the topic and again in the 1970s, it was covered ad-hoc by minority erotica in the interim. By the 1980s, a community of non-disabled and disabled people was taking shape in the US. An online world community has been in the process of formation since the 1990s as a fragmented set of Internet forums, and chat rooms.

Until the 1990s, this attraction was described mostly as acrotomophilia, at the expense of other disabilities, or of the wish by some to pretend or acquire disability. It was Bruno who systematized the attraction as factitious disability disorder. At present, other researchers argue that the main player in this phenomenon is erotic target location error and categorize the attraction as an identity disorder. Some people also desire to pretend to be disabled and acquire disabilities which are extensions of the pathological disorder. Such people were classified by Bruno as Devotees, Pretenders, and Wannabes (DPWs).

• Matt Thompson
• 05/04/2009, 2:59 PM
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