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Cripping Sexuality: A Rebellion in Photos is a student led installation for the university subject WELF3022: Sex and Disability, taught by Dr. George Turner. The show brings together artifacts curated by the students each semester. Presenting the nuances and complexities within the intersection of disability and sexuality, students blend art, scholarship, and advocacy to examine the layered tension surrounding this often challenging and confronting topic. Students highlight their learning throughout the semester through combined oral and written expression recognizing that the academy can privilege certain types of learning and how that learning is conveyed.

Collectively students are contributing to the RE-narrativizing of sex and disability, countering out-dated stereotypes, propagated by institutions, communities, families, religion, and yes universities. These stereotypes have shaped public opinion historically framing people with disabilities as pure angels needing protecting from the dirtiness of sex or framing them as sex-craved animals needing oversight and guidance by wiser caregivers.

We hope you, our guests, are challenged, provoked, and inspired to see people with disability as having agency over their lives and their own bodies, entitled to full, rich emotional and physical intimacy and having a basic human right to access sexuality education, expression, and wellbeing. We hope this exhibit is a catalyst for you to think deeply about how disabled people are “othered” especially when it comes to their sexuality. Beyond a student’s individual piece - a collection tells a story, illuminating the taboo, the unspoken…. sex and disability. As you visit each artifact, allow the collection to speak to you. When it does… pause, reflect, and ask yourself: Are you anxious about immersing yourself into this conversation? Why/ Why not? What privilege do you have around sexual wellness not provided a person with a disability? Who gets to be sexual in our society? Whose sexuality is celebrated and whose is shamed, silenced, shut-out? How might you contribute to a healthier sexually-well society?