PUBLISHED IN THE TEXT Cultures of the Maker: An Anthology of Subjectivities, Dis/abilities, and Desires, 2013.

In the Game of Strip Poker, There Are No Losers

Two curious figures with faces painted like Venetian masks occupy a bedroom that is delicately rendered in watery green pinstripes. The fanciful quality of their costumes is offset by the fact that they are only half dressed. Mirroring one another in their long flowing white hair, slim waists, arm tattoos, and shirtless nudity, they sit atop the matching tuxedo tails they have recently shed. In the midst of a capricious game of cards, most likely strip poker, they stare out at the viewer, expanding the space of the interior to envelope me, drawing me into their effervescent world. The setting of the room seems at once an ordinary bedroom and a fantastic theater in a rich, imaginary world. I feel privy to be a voyeur in the space of their bedroom, and my desire to join them is echoed by the left figure, who, with open pants, invites me in with a jaunty head tilt and exaggerated jester smile. At the same time, however, I feel hesitant to invade. The other more stoic-faced figure, possibly surprised at my intrusion, covers voluptuous breasts with a fan of cards. The bedroom is culturally coded as a private space, and the world that this painting opens up is one of unabashed erotic play.

Aurie Ramirez, the Philippines-born artist of this whimsical watercolor world, has a distinct and sophisticated style that brings to life a particular and peculiar cast of characters and settings littered with formalwear, pinstripes, and painted faces, repeated ad infinitum. The flat files of Creative Growth overflow with her watercolor and ink works. Many of her paintings are almost identical iterations representing an intense devotion to her subject matter, which stems from an amalgamation of popular culture references, including 18th-century dandyism, Venetian masquerade, glam rock, and macabre gothic costuming.

Sexual acts and erotic pleasures are recurring themes in Ramirez’s art, and the foregrounding of sex in Untitled, from 2000 (fig. 1), is a playful and productive gesturing to the intersection of sex and disability. Often infantilized, disabled bodies are rarely seen as desiring subjects or objects of sexual desire in the cultural imagination. More often than not, disability is disassociated from ideas of sexual activity, reserving sex and sexiness for abled bodies. When persons with disabilities are understood in the context of sexuality, they are typically regarded as not in control of their own bodies and restricted in both sexual expression and access to sexual experiences, particularly in the context of institutionalization. Often people with disabilities are subject to intense surveillance due to their being regarded as needing protection from themselves and others and/or regarded as displaying inappropriate sexualized behaviors in public.1 As social science researchers Daniel Goodley and Rebecca Lawthorn assert, the disabled-and-sexed body is in many ways seen as an oxymoron.2 Simultaneously associated with both infantilized asexuality and over-sexualized “perversion,” they are represented as lacking and in excess.

Additionally, notions of the “carnivalesque” continue to loom large in contemporary culture’s understanding of disabled bodies and sex. Just as disabled-and-sexualized bodies are culturally coded as both lack and excess, they are also both invisible and highly visible. The non-normative disabled body is at once disavowed and spectacularly fetishized — on sideshow display for public fascination, yet denied agency and subjecthood.3 Recently, critical disability studies scholars have begun problematizing these assumptions and querying what it would look like to consider the intersections of sexuality and disability as potentiality and possibility, rather than sexual lack or excess. Instead of thinking of disabled-and-sexed bodies in terms of deficiency and limit, what if the real limitation was acknowledged as the narrow scope of normative ableist conceptions of sex and sexuality? Similarly, rather than fetishized spectacular objects, what if the gawking stare directed at the “carnivalesque” could be repositioned as an interactive gaze,4 in which extraordinary disabled bodies exercising powerful agency and subjecthood participate?

The “carnival” in Aurie Ramirez’s work does not permit the usual derogatory associations with disability; instead, it is spun into enchanting displays of color, delicate wavering line, and a fascinating array of characters, costumes, and environments. Ramirez’s works do not shy away from the carnivalesque; the sideshow spectacle connotation is conjured and then usurped. Untitled transforms the gawking stare aimed at the fetish object into a desiring gaze exchange that opens up space for an intersubjective interaction between viewer and the work’s desiring subjects. In looking at Untitled, I am made conscious of my own body. As I gaze at them, the figures look back at me with Olympia-like agency and audacity. They involve me in their private, erotically playful space, but the alluring invitation of the left figure and the hesitation of the figure on the right generate a push and pull tension that makes me self-conscious of my participation and voyeurism. This creates a complex relationship with the artwork, and one that relates the bodies of the figures to my own body, and their desires to my desires. The costuming, makeup, and décor form an appropriation of the “carnivalesque” that enhances the desirability of the scene. In Ramirez’s works, the carnival is the material from which alluring, imaginative alternative worlds are constructed.

In their twinned dandy attire and makeup, these figures are anything but normative in their performance of gender and sexuality. If penis and breasts are read as the definitive markers of gender rather than as merely body parts, and sexuality is comprehended as hitched to gender, then the viewer might assume this is a heterosexual coupling of a man and a woman. However, the matching long hair, mask-like makeup, slim body types, and dandy attire resist this reading. Dandyism has long been taken up by academia as central to the cultural history of homosexuality. Representing fervent care for appearance, style, and manners, dandyism is hard-earned beauty with cool reserve. Historical personalities such as Oscar Wilde and visual culture representations like the dandies in Paul Cadmus’s 1930’s realist paintings figure the correlation of homosexuality with dandyism. The well-groomed and dapper dandies of Ramirez’s works don identical black top hats, immaculate tuxedo coats, and dainty gloves. Culturally constructed, gender and sexuality are better understood as nuanced spectrums of fluid and unstable identities enacted through performance, as colorful and variant as Ramirez’s watery rainbow palette. The figure on the left’s graceful, reclining posture with crossed legs, fanciful garb, blushing cheeks, and petite waist are rendered no less feminine/effeminate than those of the second person. Their masked faces produce a uniform front, which further highlights the gender performance in which they are implicated.

A normative representation of gender or sexuality is rare, if not completely absent, amongst Ramirez’s works. Her other characters, such as Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, and KISS-inspired glam rock stars, do not easily fit into stable, heteronormative classifications of gender and sexuality. Rather, her dripping-sex rock stars and extravagant dandies subvert normative gender roles with a juicy indulgence in aesthetic that verges on decadence. Furthermore, Ramirez’s works are a tribute to the multiplicity of erotic desires and pleasures that exists. In Untitled, the invitation produced by the gazing out of the picture plane indicates that sex and sexual acts need not be limited to just two. The left figure beckons while the right figure reluctantly pauses. Sexual desires and practices vary from person to person and can change over time. However, norms of sex are socially constructed and inscribed, and often these leave little room for the many different sexual desires of individual subjectivities.

Just as identifications of gender and sexuality are indeterminate, so also is ability. To assume that this is a depiction of able-bodied characters and, further, to reflect this back on the artist as representing her desire to be abled-bodied and to participate in abled-body sex acts is an assumptive, hegemonic, privileged and able-bodied viewpoint. This is partly an issue of signification. Disability is often visually signified through the physical “support” — wheelchairs, braces, crutches, and canes, such as the internationally recognized symbol for public accessibility of a stick figure in a wheelchair. In this way, disability is represented as a physical impairment affecting the movement of the body and requiring a support object rather than encompassing the full spectrum of disabilities, including those that affect the body less visibly as with individuals who are non-neurotypical, have Multiple Chemical Sensitivity/Environmental Illness (MCS/EI), or are hearing-impaired, to name a few examples. The term “disability” encompasses a wide range of physical and cognitive functional differences, and how a person experiences a disability is subjective, contingent upon personal variances such as experience, age, gender, sexuality, class, and race. Additionally, what constitutes disability by law and medical professionals, and how others interpret and police disabilities are constantly in flux. A person might evaluate the disability of someone who parks in an accessible parking space: Does the person look disabled? Is the person disabled enough to “deserve” the parking space? The symbol of the physical support acts as a tangible stand-in for “disability,” while the wider spectrum of disability lacks comparable symbols.

Even recent critical disability studies texts on the intersections of disability and sex, such as Margrit Shildrick’s Dangerous Discourses of Disability, Subjectivity, and Sexuality and editors Robert McRuer and Anna Morrow’s anthology Sex and Disability, figure disability on their front covers as a crutch and/or a wheelchair. A consequence of this is that critical disability studies is forging productive work at the intersections of sex and disability, but aesthetically this intersection is visually legible as a limited portion of the broad category of disability. Reducing disability to those that include a visual support may perpetuate ideas that sex is only available to those who can think like an able-bodied person, process desire and make decisions like an able-bodied person, but not for those who do not. If different disabilities are differently legible, then what are the aesthetics of disabilities that have no “support”?

In Untitled, the carnival acts as an entry point into scenes of light-hearted sexual play. Though, perhaps, there is the danger of an ableist, normative reading of this work, critically-distanced looking gets tangled up in voyeurism, participation, and longing. Looking becomes something more erotic and interactive. With this invitation, gender, ability, sexual preferences and practices are opened up, and embodiments of differences are something to be celebrated. Ramirez, in her beautiful rendering in flowing, subtle watercolors and ink, creates an imaginary world where erotic desires play out in a theatrical boudoir scene. In this world, everyone is allowed to be a desiring subject or a desired object. After all, in the game of strip poker, there are no losers.

Sexual acts and representations are recurrent themes in the work of Creative Growth artist, Juan Aguilera, whose mixed media drawings and ceramic sculptures are populated with nude women, flowers, female genitalia, and women’s panties and bras. Aguilera’s works almost exclusively depict bodies readable as women, but they are rarely normative in their representations. His women seductively display their denuded bodies, masturbate, pleasure one another, drink from one another’s full lactating breasts, and pull babies from their own birthing bodies. Some have non-normative features and bodies, such as women that are twice as tall as other figures and some figures have oversized clitorises that resemble penises, which make fitting them into neat gender and sex categories more difficult. Many wear their genitalia as literal undergarments, which can be put on and taken off at will.

Aguilera also creates collages of floral bouquets, in which hand-drawn and cutout images of flowers intermix with imagery of female genitalia. His mixed media work, titled Guana Juato Mexico City Mexico, from 2012 (fig. 2) falls into this latter category. Tentacle- and coral-like formations are assembled together in a fleshy peach, pink, and lavender bouquet of abstract imagery. Throughout this work, illustrations of vaginas, fetuses, uteri complete with fallopian tubes, and miniature figures of nude women are collaged on top of the foundation of the drawing. Like an otherworldly arrangement of undersea flora or an endoscopic camera tour through subcutaneous anatomy, this work is a tribute to the female form, both internal and external. Aguilera turns biology inside out and outside in with an almost clinical exploration of female form and bodily function. While many of the vulvas throughout art history point to either misogynist objectification or feminist assertion, the female genitalia in Aguilera’s work is morphed into a biological mélange that breaks down an inside/outside dichotomy. Interestingly, all but one of the vulva images are rotated upside down in relation to the rest of the work, inverted as if the observer is exploring them from the viewpoint of “down below,” looking up. In this work, Gustave Courbet’s 1866 L’Origine du monde (The Origin of the World) is mated with Georgia O’Keefe’s intimate studies of flowers and 1970’s feminist art, like Carolee Schneemann’s 1975 Interior Scroll. Erogenous zones mingle with imagery of wombs and fetuses, which appear to blossom off and hover around a bundle of tentacle arms (fig. 3). The work is clinical in its illustrations, but erotic in its luscious colors and velvety application of pigment. Like a flower arrangement that is meant to embellish an interior by bringing outside nature in, Aguilera’s bouquet is a beautifying conflation of inside and outside, evocative of pleasurable sensations both seen and unseen. It is a study that connotes a preoccupation with bodies while exhibiting a sensitive appreciation and an educational curiosity of female bodily workings and forms.

Taking up the other end of the genitalia spectrum, Nick Pagan’s handmade rug from 2010 of a larger-than-life penis, titled Power to the Boner #1 (fig. 4), provides a humorous take on the 1960’s slogan “Power to the People.”5 Depicting an anthropomorphized penis with a forcefully raised fist, and wearing a kelly-green sweater decorated with a rainbow — all against an explosively yellow and orange background — the rug is a tongue-in-cheek representation of the phallus. Playing with the domestic and decorative materiality of a shag rug, the work is ironic, but assertively so. The retro orange and green colors, combined with the shaggy tactility of the yarn, add to the 60’s association of the phrase “Power to the People.” However, the nostalgic feel and comic strip-style rendering of the sweater-donning boner are light-hearted. The tactility of rugs — the desire to touch, walk on, and sit on them — becomes simultaneously satirical and seductive when the tactility is transferred to a giant penis. Similarly, the rug confronts the viewer with the contradiction of hard versus soft, and the sexual connotation of “rug” as a play on women’s public hair is pitted against a representation of male genitalia.

In the world of Freud, the phallus is power, but Pagan’s phallus is less about male dominance and more about empowerment, albeit expressed in a cheeky manner. Both synecdoche and anthropomorphized body part, Power to the Boner #1 disrupts both “lack” and “excess” associations regarding disabled-and-sexed bodies by pulling the metaphorical rug out from under heteronormative ableism. Asserting its monumental existence and presence, the penis is anything but lack. Instead, the boner takes excess to the extreme, and it sardonically laughs in the face of notions of perversion and the carnivalesque. The rug’s mascot is both self-aware and in-your-face. The title signals that this penis is not just anthropomorphic, exhibiting human characteristics, but it is also a figuration of the activist. Standing erect on a soapbox-like set of hairy testicles, the head can easily be imagined as shouting its rally cry from its urethra mouth. Pagan’s penis rug deftly announces its un-ignorable presence. This oversized dirty doodle could be the sex organ of a man with a disability, but, as a synecdoche, it is also a substitute for the man himself. Empowered to own its desires and demanding to be recognized, this big dick is cocked and ready, and it isn’t going anywhere. In its monumentality, activist implications, and comedic anthropomorphism, the penis’s reference to 1960’s political activism is transformed into cheeky disability-and-sex activism.

As Anna Morrow and Robert McRuer note, fighting for “access” in relation to sex and private spaces raises a much more complex set of issues than fighting for access to public spaces, such as the installation of a ramp or elevator:

“Disability scholarship and activism, seeming to draw on the second-wave feminist insistence that the personal is political, have demonstrated that the cordoning off of certain categories of experience (such as “sex” and “disability”) as “private matters” is itself a profoundly political act, with often insidious effects.”6

The bedroom is a political space, and access to sex is a political concern for all people, those with disabilities included. A lack of access is co-constituted by both laws and social norms that treat disability as unsexy. Bethany Stevens, self-proclaimed “uppity crip scholar-activist and sexologist,” describes feelings of internalized ableism and self-loathing she had as a teenager:

“I would often ask my mother would I ever fall in love and would I ever sex [sic]. She assured me some wonderful man would, at some point in the far off future, be able to see past my disability and see me as attractive and brilliant. I didn’t know then that it is absolutely ridiculous and ableist…to suggest someone would see past what would become a core part of me.”7

As Stevens notes, to hope for a romantic partner who could see beyond, or overlook, her disability would be a disavowal of a large, indivisible part of her identity and the way she experiences the world. Critical disability theory and disability activism (also referred to as “crip activism”) emphasize that to focus solely on the ways that people with disabilities represent an oppressed minority and to pose disability as the “odds” to be “overcome” is to reinscribe the already pervasive views that disability is something to be cured and those with disabilities are objects of pity and lack. Scholars and activists, such as Margrit Shildrick, seek not only to record the oppression of communities of disabled bodies, but to show how disability represents a different, extraordinary embodiment and interaction with the world; thus, they reframe sexual lack and excess as sexual potentiality and interconnection. Shildrick, in particular, demonstrates in her work how disability productively challenges limiting normative paradigms of embodiment and can, instead, offer up an expanded model of fluid identity.8

Stevens’s remark above also significantly points to difficulties experienced with family members, who often struggle to provide meaningful support, particularly where sexuality is concerned. In an article published in 1993, titled “Don’t Mourn for Us”, the author John Sinclair implores parents of autistic children to alter their perspectives. He states, “…when parents say, I wish my child did not have autism, what they’re really saying is, I wish the autistic child I have did not exist, and I had a different (non-autistic) child instead.”9 In many cases, family members are the direct source of the majority of surveillance and regulation, including institutionalization, with regards to sexuality. For many of Creative Growth’s artists, the family who welcomes and accepts them is the community within the Center. Artist teachers, Center staff, and other artists with disabilities provide positive, meaningful relationships and contact that some may not experience elsewhere. Although Creative Growth must follow strict state-instituted rules governing contact, several romantic and/or married couples attend Creative Growth together. These individuals are able to engage in an atmosphere — perhaps the only atmosphere outside of their own homes — that allows them to exist in public as a romantic couple engaging in intimate contact without judgment, stares, or, worse yet, violence.

Despite the de-eroticization, institutional restriction, marginalization, and continual disavowal of disabled-and-sexed bodies, these artworks point to the potentiality of sex and disability through representations of sexual desires, positive erotic pleasures and practices, and corporeal affirmation. As art, these pieces are creative expressions of sexual and sensual experiences, imagined or real, at times humorous and others tender and seductive. As art by artists with disabilities, these works are a significant constellation that demonstrates the nuanced, complicated relationship between disability and sex as well as disability’s potential to radically explode the narrow scope of sex norms. If they are shocking it is not because they boast sex as their subject; rather, it is because the vibrant fantasy worlds of Aurie Ramirez shock one out of ennui; because the luscious botanical and other-worldly manifestations of Juan Aguilera shock one with the human capacity for deeply tender and eroticized devotion to the body; and because the punk activist energy of Nick Pagan’s rug cheekily shocks one out of complacency with its affirmation of disabled-and-sexed bodies.

I do not intend to presume that all disabilities are the same, are all experienced in the same way, or that all Creative Growth artists create or wish to create work expressing sexual desires. However, these artworks render visible positive intersections of sex and disability, making clear that the personal is indeed the political. Art has the potential for radically altering public perceptions and inviting imaginings of different realities — worlds where sex and disability go together, where disabled bodies are sexually desirable, where people with disabilities are powerful agents of their multiplicity of desires and have the freedom to publicly express those desires. These artworks imagine just such a world, and as active cultural producers these artists are significantly contributing to its being made a reality.

1 Daniel Goodley and Rebecca Lawthorn “Disability, Deleuze, and Sex,” in Deleuze and Sex, ed. Frida Beckman (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 90.

2 In using the term “disabled-and-sexed body,” I am following Daniel Goodley and Rebecca Lawthorn in order to indicate the intersections of disability and sexuality — how the two are acting together — and the embodiment of these two things, which are culturally coded as unrelated. This, however, is not to say that there is a disabled body that is not sexed or that sexuality cannot be expressed as asexuality. See their article “Disability, Deleuze, and Sex,” in Deleuze and Sex, ed. Frida Beckman (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 89-105.

3 See Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, “The Politics of Staring: Visual Rhetorics of Disability in Popular Photography” in Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, ed. Sharon L. Snyder (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2002), 56-75.

4 For further reading on the “stare” in relation to photographs of disabled bodies see Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, ibid. Garland-Thomson theorizes the visual rhetorics of the unmitigated stare at photographs of disabled bodies as an intense form of looking that absolves the viewer of responsibility, produces disability as absolute difference, and manifests the power relations between subject and object.

5 “Power to the People,” a phrase used as a rallying cry against class and racial oppression, is associated with the Black Panther Party; but, it also has been adopted by many groups and organizations in history since, to represent an empowered populace.

6 Robert McRuer and Anna Morrow, eds. “Introduction,” Sex and Disability (Durham and London: Duke Univeristy Press, 2012),7.

7 Bethany Stevens, “What I Would Tell My Teenage Self About Sexuality,” from Crip Confessions: Rants of a Crip Sexologist (December 2011), http://www.cripconfessions.com (accessed February 9, 2013).

8 See Margrit Shildrick, Dangerous Discourses of Disability, Subjectivity, and Sexuality (New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2009).

9 John Sinclair, “Don’t Mourn for Us,” Autism Network International newsletter, Our Voice, Vol. 1, No. 3 (1993), Cf. web.archive.org/web/20090329155049/http://web.syr.edu/~jisincla/dontmourn.htm (accessed February 9, 2013).