BPF Scientific Meeting: Impairment, socialization and embodiment: The sexual oppression of people with physical disabilities.

People with disabilities face multiple forms of social exclusion, discrimination and oppression, including in the domain of sex and sexuality. From a critical psychoanalytic viewpoint, social responses to persons with impairments are strongly unconsciously mediated, and often dominated by projections based on archaic anxieties about dependency, vulnerability and shame. Where disability meets sexuality, these defences may be more prominent still, resulting, for one example, in the prejudiced myth that people with disabilities are disinterested in, or not capable of, sex. Using this theoretical stance, and drawing on narrative research data, this paper examines how the developmental role of family and societal influences on the social constructions of sexuality and disability might be internalized, resisted and negotiated.

about the speaker

Poul Rohleder is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and clinical psychologist in private practice, and member of the BPF. For many years, he was an academic and active researcher in the areas of sexuality, marginalized identities and mental health and has published widely in these areas. He was principal researcher on an internationally funded research project exploring the sexuality and sexual self-esteem of people with physical disabilities in South Africa.

CPD

Yes