‘I love my body’: Depictions of sex and romance in disability music culture

Abstract

The international disability music scene is a thriving musical subculture consisting of performers self-identifying as disabled who use their performances to explore experiences of living with disability. As a genre predominantly written by, about and for people with disabilities, it provides a space for discourse about life with disability which is largely unmediated by governmental policy, political correctness or able-bodied facilitators. As such, it is a medium through which people with disability are free to express opinions about sex and romance rarely seen in mainstream media. This article examines the ways in which the topics of sexuality and romance are explored within disability music culture. It will focus on four case study songs, I Love My Body (1988) by Johnny Crescendo, Vagina Ain’t Handicapped (2011) by Laura Martinez, Def Deaf Girls (2012) by Sean Forbes and No Goodbyes (2012) by Rory Burnside and Rohan Brooks from Rudely Interrupted. These four songs will be used to explore the themes of body image, cultural expectations of the disabled body, the benefits of dating fellow members of the disability community and relationships. This article also draws on the author’s own experience as a person with disability and a musician in a band that regularly performs on the disability music scene.

Keywords

disability music musicology popular music sexuality

The international disability music scene is a musical subculture that grew out of the disability activism movement in the 1980s (Cameron, 2009: 383). The disability activism movement emerged in the 1970s as ‘politicised disabled people … began to make their voices heard by demanding inclusion as equals within a society from which they had largely been excluded’ (Cameron, 2009: 381). The late 1970s also coincided with governmental policies of deinstitutionalization of people with disabilities in a number of countries, including the UK, Australia and the USA. Although in most cases this improved the standard of education for disabled children, deinstitutionalization had one potential downside for disability culture: it separated people with disability from their disabled peers. As Garland-Thomson (1997: 35) noted, ‘Segregation, despite its disadvantages, can forge the sense of community from which politicized consciousness and nationalism emerges.’ No longer forced together into special schools, many disabled people now grew up not having ever met other people with disability. As a result, the disability community formed out of the twin needs for activism and social peer support. The disability arts movement broadly, and the disability music scene specifically, grew out of these twin needs in the mid-1980s, providing a medium in which to share information, ideas and opinions about living with disability as well as entertainment at disability community events (Cameron, 2009: 383).

One of the political aims of the disability community has been replacing the medical model of disability, in which disability is seen as something to be overcome via medical intervention, with the social model in which actual impairment is seen as less disabling than society’s attitudes to that impairment (Shakespeare et al., 1996: 2). In the last decade, a cultural model of disability has emerged, in which disabled people are seen as belonging to ‘a political and cultural movement where disability or crip identity and cultures are collectively shaped and reshaped’, thus forming a discreet subculture, similar to the emergence of queer culture in the 1970s and 1980s (McRuer, 2006: 88, emphasis in original).

Much of the discussion in the mainstream media surrounding sex and disability focuses on the medical model, either discussing topics such as access to sex education, forced sterilization or access to sex workers (see AAP, 2013; Negline, 2013). Love, sexual expression and sensuality are rarely explored. In reclaiming their right to a positive sexual identity, the disability community has faced many of the same challenges as the queer and trans communities. All three groups have faced fear and discrimination for not conforming to society’s expectations of heteronormative relationships (Hirschmann, 2013: 139). Indeed, the trans medical model that states that trans people are ‘trapped in the wrong body’ resonates strongly with the idea that disabled people too, are trapped in bodies that are somehow ‘wrong’ (Bettcher, 2004: 383).¹ Like the queer and trans communities, disabled people have re-imagined discussions about sex and romance and have embraced broader definitions of sex than traditional phallocentric ones (Tepper, 2000: 287).

Tepper argues that disabled people’s sexuality can be more limited by social barriers than actual impairment and a study by Esmail et al. found that their (able-bodied) participants often viewed disabled people as asexual (2010: 1151; see also Tepper, 2000: 285). Given these findings, I have decided to focus on concepts of romance as well as sex in this article. While sex is something that usually takes place behind closed doors, I define romance as the public expression of relationships. Romantic activities might include holding hands, kissing and candle-lit dinners. While people with disabilities may have to negotiate with caregivers to be able to participate in sex, romance is obvious to outside observers and therefore can attract discrimination on a wider basis.

As a genre predominantly written by, about and for disabled people, disability music provides a space for discourse about life with disability that can begin to provide a more balanced view of disability and sexuality. This article uses four case study songs to explore four themes relating to sex and romance. These themes and songs are: body image, with Johnny Crescendo’s I Love My Body (1988); cultural expectations of the disabled body with Laura Martinez’s Vagina Ain’t Handicapped (2011); the advantages of dating within the disabled community with Sean Forbes’s Def Deaf Girls (2012) and relationships with No Goodbyes (2012) by Rory Burnside and Rohan Brooks. Disability music is a subculture which I have personal experience of, both as a person with disability and as a performer in the band the Bearbrass Asylum Orchestra. In this article I will be exploring the work of musicians with physical, sensory and intellectual disabilities. For reasons of space I will not be exploring music written and performed by people with mental illness.

I used a number of methods to assess the range of disability music songs discussing sex and romance which lead to me choosing the four case studies. I began by searching through the back catalogues of disabled musicians whom I was already aware of in my role as a performing musician in the disability music scene. I also examined the existing literature, both academic and from specific disability media outlets, for references to specific musicians and/or songs. Finally, I sent out requests on social media to disabled musicians and audience members alike, asking for their favourite songs about sex, romance and disability.

The four case study songs have been chosen because they represent four topics surrounding sex and romance that appear regularly in both disability music and disability culture more generally. They also represent some of the diversity present in disability music. The performers come from three different countries (the UK, the USA and Australia), play in different genres (blues, hip hop and rock) and have a range of disabilities (physical disability, blindness, deafness, autism and intellectual disability). I also chose one song written in the early years of the disability music scene, I Love My Body (1988) in order to compare it with the other songs, all written during the last five years. Although I make reference to the musical and visual content of the songs, my main focus has been on how the lyrics of the songs address issues of disability, sex and romance.

Although the case study songs come from three different countries, these are socially, culturally and linguistically similar. This is not meant to suggest that disability music culture is limited to English-speaking countries. On the contrary, there are vibrant disability subcultures around the world producing music about their own local situations in their own languages, including Staff Benda Bilili (Congo), Human Station (Thailand), Israel Vibration (Jamaica) and Pertti Kurikan Nimipäivät (Finland). As this is the first study that I am aware of which compares disability music from different nations, I made the deliberate decision to begin this research by comparing musicians from countries with broadly similar cultural backgrounds. I hope to extend this research to musicians from a wider range of cultural and linguistic backgrounds in a future study.

This article builds on a growing body of work surrounding disability and music, including Straus’s Extraordinary Measures: Disability in Music (2011), McKay’s Shakin’ All Over: Popular Music and Disability (2013) and Lubet’s Music, Disability and Society (2011). While these publications focus predominantly on musicians who happen to be disabled, I am only aware of one publication that specifically focuses on disabled musicians working within disability music culture, which is Cameron’s ‘Tragic but Brave or Just Crips with Chips? Songs and their Lyrics in the Disability Arts Movement in Britain’ (2009). This article builds on Cameron’s study in two ways: first, rather than just focusing on the UK, it will examine disabled musicians from the UK, the USA and Australia to assess whether their songs contain similar themes; and second, while Cameron focuses on humour as a form of protest in disability music, this article focuses on depictions of sex and romance.

In exploring humour in disability music, Cameron (2009: 392–393) finds that musicians in his study use music to confront ‘the domination and oppression experienced by disabled people’ and assert ‘the rights of people with impairments to feel good about being who they are – in the face of oppression’. Likewise, in exploring depictions of sex and romance, the musicians in the current study use their songs to reject oppressive stereotypes, replacing them with depictions of disabled people who are desirable and sexually capable. In The Sexual Politics of Disability: Untold Desires (1996), Shakespeare et al. broke new ground exploring concepts of sex and disability by actually asking disabled people about their views. Likewise, this article will explore sex and disability by examining what disabled people are saying to each other through the medium of popular music. While disabled voices are often mediated through able-bodied facilitators, or simplified as tragic but inspiring in mainstream media outlets, by choosing to speak directly to the disabled community through their music, the musicians in this study are freed from the need to explain, defend or apologize for their lives because they are able to assume a level of shared experience with their audiences.

Body image and self esteem: ‘I love my body’ by Johnny Crescendo

A glance at mainstream media advertisements demonstrates the kind of bodies society considers desirable: tall, symmetrical, clear-skinned, voluptuous (but slim) if female, muscular if male and profoundly able-bodied (Tepper, 2000: 285). In reality, few people fit these stereotypes; however, for people with disability, many of whom have bodies that can never meet ‘the narrow band of what counts as sexually attractive or successful’, the impact of these impossible standards can be particularly acute (Shildrick, 2007: 57). The direct effects of disability and its treatments, including pain, loss of sensation, trauma, and the effect of having to rely on others for personal care, can also add to a feeling of disassociation from one’s body (Shakespeare et al., 1996: 143).

Johnny Crescendo explores his personal journey of learning to accept his disabled body in I Love My Body. Johnny Crescendo (Alan Holdsworth) is a British-born disability activist and blues-musician. I Love My Body was released on his first album, Choices and Rights (1988). A 12-bar blues ballad, it features guitar, vocals and harmonica, all played by Crescendo. I Love My Body was written in the first decade after the emergence of the disability music scene, when the focus of the community was strongly on activism. Crescendo and other British disabled musicians of the 1980s, including Ian Stanton, were influenced by the blues and folk musicians of the American Civil Rights Movement, in which:

Polish is not the main thing. It is authenticity that counts, the spirit of what is being sung rather than how perfectly manufactured it sounds. This is about the oppressed making their own use of available cultural resources to make their voices heard. (Cameron, 2009: 382)

Crescendo is a prime example of this attitude to performance and activism. The album recording for I Love My Body shows few signs of post-production mixing, nor does it feature added session musicians. The recording is simple, featuring ‘one man and his guitar’ (Cameron, 2009: 389) sounding much as it would in live performance, with the main focus being on clear lyrics delivering a political message over a simple, chordal accompaniment. This simple arrangement not only serves the purpose of clearly highlighting the lyrics, but also suited the venues in which disability events were held in the 1980s. With limited disability access to performance spaces, events were often held in ‘arts centres, community centres, sports centres, day centres, pubs, college bars, residential homes: most importantly, in any place where disabled people have been able to get to’ (Cameron, 2009: 382). Simple melodies with basic accompaniments suited these venues, which were often small and had little, if any, audio equipment. In the 27 years since I Love My Body was released, disability access has improved, at least in the countries represented by the case studies, but while access for audience members is more widespread, access to stages for disabled performers is still limited. Disabled musicians are no longer forced to regularly perform in non-traditional venues, and instead tend to congregate around the few venues with accessible stages in any given city. Although this access is still far from universal, it means that disabled musicians are now more likely to have access to professional-standard sound systems, allowing for denser, more amplified music than Crescendo and his generation were able to perform.

I Love My Body is a love song in which the object of affection is one’s self. Although titled I Love My Body, this lyric is replaced in many places with the phrase ‘I’m in love with my body’, implying that Crescendo’s disabled body is worthy of romantic, as well as platonic love. Crescendo sees his membership of the disability community as a key factor in learning to love his body and take pride in himself:

When I accepted myself I could accept my body and I could love it. After all it is the only one we get. A lot of disabled people I know live their lives wishing to be someone else some one they are not. I am gratefull [sic] to the disabled people who got me into the movement … otherwise I could have been a wannabee. (Holdsworth, 2004)

Indeed, Crescendo sees the embracing of his disabled status as adding to his identity, giving him added resilience, giving him something extra in comparison to those who have not been through this journey. In I Love My Body he sings:

My body’s got what yours has

But there’s something else it’s got

My body’s got self-dignity

My body’s got self-respect

No one can take that away from me

In this world or the next.

I Love My Body is a protest song in which the personal becomes political. Crescendo, inspired by the blues and folk musicians of the Civil Rights Movement, uses their musical idioms to declare pride in a body that society had told him was unattractive and shameful. Using the social model of disability, Crescendo is asserting that an inability to notice the attractiveness of his or any other disabled body is a flaw in the eye of the beholder, not in the disabled body itself. I Love My Body is an early example of disability music and, as such, it discusses one of the first steps that the disability community needed to make in reclaiming their sexuality: learning to love themselves.

Cultural expectations of the disabled body: Vagina Ain’t Handicapped by Laura Martinez

People with obvious disabilities are often subjected to unwanted assumptions about their bodies and sexual capabilities. Columnist Nicole Smith (2014) writes that she and her boyfriend (both disabled) were asked by strangers ‘Do you two lie down together?’ and in her one-woman show Tales from the Crip (2014) the comedian, the late Stella Young, related a story about being asked by a stranger if she had a vagina. Intrusive questions such as these have lead to disabled performers responding in ways that question the assumption that their bodies are asexual, recasting themselves as both sexy and sexual.

American video blogger and hip hop artist Laura Martinez worked under the stage names Cripple with Swag and MC Meals on Wheels. Using an electric wheelchair for mobility and a ventilator to assist her breathing, Martinez is not known to have performed live, instead producing blogs and music videos from her home. Vagina Ain’t Handicapped was recorded on her webcam using a pre-recorded backing track playing in the background of the video, with no further audio engineering. Despite the low production values, the song went viral and at the time of writing had received 835,622 views on YouTube over three years. American-based band Wheelchair Sports Camp later covered the song. Laura Martinez died in 2012 aged 19.

The success of Vagina Ain’t Handicapped is a result of the liberating effect that online communication has had for many people with disability. The internet has provided a space where people with disability who might otherwise be socially isolated are able to engage with the world and form communities without leaving their home (Obst and Stafurick, 2010: 529). Through her blogs and music videos, Martinez created an online identity and became a well-known musician in the disability community throughout the English-speaking world without ever performing live or entering a recording studio.

Vagina Ain’t Handicapped is a protest against the assumption that a disabled person is incapable of sexual expression. In the original recording, the wheeze of Martinez’s ventilator is audible and the enforced rhythm of her breathing at times fights against the beat of the song, giving it a disjointed feeling. Martinez struggles to fit in lyrics after they have been delayed by her forced breathing, or cuts short the ends of her phrases as they are silenced by the intrusion of her ventilator. While these chaotic rhythmic lines are a natural part of her singing caused by her disability, British new wave musician and polio-survivor Ian Dury deliberately created a similar effect in his song about residential special schools, Hey, Hey Take Me Away (1980). Writing of this, McKay (2013: 40) notes:

The editing of the voice tracks is extraordinary and sometimes brutal, and contributes powerfully to the song’s confusion, discomfort, and fright … Some of Dury’s words are spliced out half-way through, odd sentences make no sense, he runs out of time toward the end as the pre-recorded music runs away from him … the listener is disrupted and disturbed.

Dury used editing techniques to portray not just the chaotic nature of life in a residential special school, but also the speech patterns of fellow residents confined to iron lungs. Iron lungs, like Martinez’s ventilator, control a person’s breathing with an enforced rhythm. These enforced rhythms, along with her unusually high-pitched, reedy voice make Martinez’s disability obvious in her song; however, the effect is not chaotic as in Hey, Hey Take Me Away, but powerful. Martinez can be heard gasping for air and at times almost spitting out the lyrics, but she continues regardless, determined to get across her message of sexual capability. In the chorus she acknowledges some of the physical effects of her disability, including those on her voice, while at the same time asserting that they do not impact on her sexuality:

My vagina ain’t handicap, vagina ain’t handicap

So what I can’t walk? My vagina ain’t handicap

My vagina ain’t handicap, vagina ain’t handicap

Voice’s high when I talk … but my vagina ain’t handicap.²

In Vagina Ain’t Handicapped, Martinez describes her disabled status with terms that are often considered offensive, some of which, like ‘cripple’, have been reappropriated by the disability community. Others, like ‘tard’ (an abbreviation of retarded), are yet to be embraced and are still the focus of anti-discrimination campaigns (see Special Olympics, R-Word). She uses similarly contested language when referring to her ethnic background, using the terms ‘nigga’ and ‘mex’. Martinez does not limit her use of such language to minority groups, instead using similar language to describe able-bodied people. She calls her attendant carers ‘grimmeys’ (meaning something that is wrong or mean) and able-bodied people ‘normies’, describing her sexual encounters with them thus:

I've had sex with normies, they were pelting my ass

and once you go cripple, well, they just ain’t ever been back

This places the normative body firmly within the realm of the ‘other’, painting the disabled body as not only capable of sexual function, but as preferable to and more sexually desirable than that of able-bodied people. By using language like ‘cripple’, ‘tard’ and ‘normie’, Martinez also speaks in a language immediately recognizable to her disabled audience, while at the same time alienating outsiders not familiar with the reappropriation of such language.

Vagina Ain’t Handicapped is a response by a specific musician, Martinez, about incorrect assumptions made about her body. In that context it is an empowering song that calls on listeners not to pre-judge disabled people’s sexuality; however, its focus on genitalia runs the risk of alienating those disabled people whose genitalia are affected by their disability (for example, some people with spinal cord injury have limited genital sensation and functionality). Martinez discusses a range of sexual activities, including oral sex, sado-masochism and even penetration of her breathing tube, placing her experience of sexuality outside heteronormative confines. However the title and chorus of Vagina Ain’t Handicapped put the focus of the song directly on genitalia and can be seen as reinforcing the stereotype that if your vagina (or penis) is handicapped, then you are not capable of sexual expression, or that alternative forms of sexual expression are inferior to penetrative sex (Shakespeare, 1999: 57). However, by depicting a young, disabled women eagerly participating in a variety of sexual activities, Vagina Ain’t Handicapped clearly breaks through society’s expectations of the disabled body as asexual.

Dating within the disability community: Def Deaf Girls by Sean Forbes

As a disabled person, choosing to date another person with a disability can have both positive and negative effects. A fellow disabled person is likely to understand the practical, social and cultural implications of disability and less likely to see a potential partner’s impairment as problematic. However, a couple in which both partners have a similar disability may find themselves more reliant on others for attendant care than would a couple in which one member is able-bodied.

American Deaf hip hop artist Sean Forbes explores the experience of dating within the Deaf community in Def Deaf Girls.³ Forbes’s primary target markets are the Deaf and hearing-impaired communities. To make his music accessible to this audience, his songs are released with accompanying music videos in which Forbes sings simultaneously in English and American Sign Language (ASL), accompanied by written English captions.

Def Deaf Girls was released on the album, Perfect Imperfection (2012). The song features a strong rhythmic beat, with bass and percussive lines that deliver powerful vibrations to a hearing-impaired audience. Deaf audiences rely on a range of methods to appreciate music; foremost among these techniques is focusing on vibrations to ‘feel’ the beat. Methods employed to increase the ability to perceive these vibrations include: listening barefoot to increase the vibrations coming through the floor, laying speakers face down on the floor, or pushing the bass levels up on playback equipment. As a result of this reliance on vibrations, music written for Deaf and hearing-impaired audiences often features strong, rhythmic bass lines. Other techniques improving musical access to Deaf audiences include watching the movements of performers and following written lyrics while listening (hence the English captioning on Forbes’s videos). Forbes’s Deafness is noticeable in his music, not just from the topics he discusses and his use of ASL, but also through the slight slurring of his words and the use of rhymes which sound unusual to hearing audiences (for example, ‘drooling’ and ‘foolish’).

The Def Deaf Girls video features Forbes and two band mates standing at a bar, watching girls dancing. Although deafness is an invisible disability, Forbes recognizes that one dancing girl is Deaf because she is dancing to the beat of a ‘different drummer’. Intrigued he approaches her to introduce himself, but the girl (played by Forbes in drag) recognizes him, in an acknowledgement both of the tight-knit nature of the Deaf community, and Forbes’s place as a well-known performer in it.

When Forbes appears in drag as the sexy girl on the dance floor, he is seen for only a moment. Many Deaf people who have a heightened visual acuity may be able to quickly recognize the girl as Forbes. However hearing audiences watching the clip may struggle to identify the woman as played by Forbes in the short time available (I did not recognize him myself until reading discussions of the scene on social media). This brief visual joke privileges Deaf audiences, not only over able-bodied ones, but also over hearing people with disabilities. This highlights the fact that ‘disability is an over-arching and in some ways artificial category’ covering a wide range of impairments, and that the differences in these impairments affect the ways in which people with different disabilities experience the world (Garland-Thomson, 1997: 13). Forbes’s target audience is not disabled people generally, but Deaf and hearing-impaired people specifically. Seeing Forbes in drag also undermines the heteronormative assumptions behind a song in which a Deaf man sings about Deaf girls. There is an ambiguity in seeing Forbes’s ‘dream girl’ as himself in drag and one is forced to ask does she represent a cis woman, a trans woman, Forbes himself or all of the above?

Forbes implies that he finds it preferable to date Deaf girls, and that as a Deaf man, who is a ‘silent riot’ in the bedroom, he has something to offer them that hearing men may not. In Def Deaf Girls relationships between Deaf people are celebrated for the added intimacy and understanding that may exist between them as the song explores the positive and pleasurable sides of dating within the Deaf community.

Relationships: ‘No Goodbyes’ by Rory Burnside and Rohan Brooks, Rudely Interrupted

Love and romantic relationships are popular topics for popular song in virtually all genres and disability music is no exception. Many of these focus on relationships without ever directly mentioning disability. The members of Rudely Interrupted, who perform No Goodbyes (2012), are open about their disabilities and actively perform within the disability community, but if it were not for that fact, No Goodbyes would not be obviously linked to disability.

In reviewing the disability/love song genre, I came across a large number of love songs that did not actively mention disability, including The Promise (2014) by Maja Nilsson (Sweden), Love is All You Need (1995) by Israel Vibration (Jamaica) and Macht Liebe Glücklich (2014) by MC Chriscore (Germany). At first glance, songs that do not mention disability may appear to offer little to the field of disability studies, but in reality they are an example of disabled musicians claiming their right to an active, self-determined love life in the exact same way as their non-disabled counterparts. For many of these performers, their disability is obvious to audiences despite the fact that it is not mentioned in their songs; the members of Israel Vibration, for example can be seen dancing while using crutches. This combination of obviously disabled musicians performing songs about love undermines the cultural assumption that disabled people are asexual without ever having to mention disability in the lyrics.

Rudely Interrupted are an Australian rock band. Their current membership features four members, three of whom have a disability. No Goodbyes was co-written by band members Rory Burnside and Rohan Brooks. Burnside, the band’s lead singer and keyboard player is blind and has autism. He was also born with a cleft palate and, although it was surgically repaired when he was a child, its effects are audible in his lyrics though a nasal tone in his voice. Rohan Brooks, the band’s guitarist and manager is able-bodied, while their drummer, Josh Hogan and their bass player and backing dancer Sam Beke, both have intellectual disabilities.

In No Goodbyes Burnside sings of his love over a dense, driving rock accompaniment:

Girl,

There’s a fire burning,

There’s a fire burning in my heart,

And I knew,

And I knew right from the very start,

That you and me would never part.

The accompanying film clip shows Burnside flirting with various women, at least one of whom has an obvious disability, interspersed with footage of the band performing. The vision of Burnside flirting features body language usually associated with attraction: giggling, grinning, casual touching, but also features behaviours specific to Burnside’s disabilities. His disabilities may not be mentioned in the lyrics of the song, but Burnside’s blindness is made obvious as he leans on his white cane and as one woman guides him through a crowded nightclub. His autism is evident as he jumps up and down and flaps his hands when excited.

Symptoms of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) include impairments in social interactions and communication: ‘That is, the qualities and traits needed to understand, develop, and maintain close interpersonal and sexual relationships are precisely those traits that are impaired in ASDs’ (Byers et al., 2013: 419). This has lead to an incorrect stereotype that people with autism are always already asexual, or unable to engage in romantic relationships (Depreyde, 2014; Dewinter et al., 2013: 3468). The lyrics of No Goodbyes repeatedly use the phrase ‘this love’s real’ to describe the relationship depicted in the song. The audience is left in no doubt that his feelings and relationships are as ‘real’ as those of someone who is neurologically typical.

No Goodbyes may not mention disability in its lyrics but it is performed by musicians who are open about, and proud of, their identity as disabled. By refusing to draw a distinction between their own romantic and sexual experiences, and those of the able-bodied population, these musicians are actively claiming their equal rights and status as sexual and romantic beings. For an autistic visually impaired man to stand on stage and sing about falling in love challenges and disrupts mainstream ableist attitudes regarding the assumed emotional and sexual capabilities and desires of people with autism and sensory disabilities. I have been unable to find a single song in which disabled musicians sing about or portray themselves as unable or unwilling to engage in sexual activities and/or romantic engagements. That is not to say that there are no songs in disability music dealing with the heartbreak or romantic loss – Maja Nilsson’s The Promise, for example, discusses the loneliness associated with the end of a relationship through the eyes of someone with autism – but this experience does not result in Nilsson abandoning the search for a sexual and romantic partner.

Conclusions

Disability music culture includes a wide range of songs about sex and romance. Although these songs discussed in this article cover different topics and were written by musicians with different disabilities, living in different places and performing different musical genres, certain themes emerge. All the musicians claim their rights to, and capabilities of, having romantic and/or sexual relationships. Songs that do story problems in relationships, like that of Martinez and Nilsson, reflect these issues as a result of social factors including prejudices and lack of understanding. These songs fit firmly within the social model of disability, in which the major disabling factor is not impairment but society’s attitude towards that impairment. There is no need for these songs to explain concepts such as the social model or slang terms such as ‘normies’ because both the performers and audience members have a shared knowledge of disability culture.

In an early example of disability music, Johnny Crescendo used I Love My Body to show members of the newly-forming disability community that the first step to a healthy relationship is to love oneself. Later, Laura Martinez undermined cultural expectations of her disabled body in My Vagina Ain’t Handicapped, a song in which she claims a powerful sexual identity and embraces disabled people’s outsider status by demonstrating that her sexuality does not fit within a heteronormative construct. In Def Deaf Girls Sean Forbes actively states his preference for Deaf sexual and romantic partners as more desirable than able-bodied ones. He too breaks heteronormative constructs by casting himself in drag as his own dream woman. No Goodbyes challenges the assumption that all disabled people are asexual, and that autistic people are incapable of love or forming romantic and intimate relationships. Between them, these four songs present a powerful voice for disabled people and their right and desire to embrace their own sexuality.

In researching humour in disability music, Cameron (2009: 392–393) found the musicians he studied used their music to advocate for ‘the rights of people with impairments to feel good about being who they are – in the face of oppression' (pp. 392–393). The disabled musicians discussed in this article have also embraced and defended their rights to sex, sexuality and sexual citizenship. An articulation of acts and practices of desire and pleasure, and a rejection and subversion of those discourses and acts that discriminate and oppress the rights of disabled people to experience the pleasure (and pain) of sex and romance is evidenced in the song lyrics and/or the visuals of the music clips. The songs in the case studies show people with disabilities as both sexual and sexy-while society may not always recognize disabled peoples rights and desires for sexual pleasure and engagements of intimacy, music created by, for and about people with disabilities is significant cultural forum for representing and storying sex, sexuality and desire.

Footnotes

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the commercial, public or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

Anthea Skinner has recently submitted her PhD in musicology at the Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music at Monash University in Australia. Her thesis explores the lives of military bandsmen in Australia during World War II. In 2012 her research on the history of disability music won the Musicological Society of Australia's Student Prize for best paper. Anthea currently works at the Music Archive of Monash University (MAMU) and her main fields of study are disability music culture, military bands, music archiving, music and conflict, organology and disability music culture. She is the music columnist for Link Disability Magazine and plays percussion in the all-disabled band, the Bearbrass Asylum Orchestra.

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