Anxious Embodiment,Disability, and Sexuality: A Response to Margrit Shildrick

This piece responds to Margrit Shildrick's “Dangerous Discourses,” which offers a theorization of embodiment useful to several fields of scholarship, including disability studies, gender theory, and queer theory. I argue that these fields must take sexuality seriously as a site for both bodily construction and bodily disruption and that the complexities of corporeal contact offer a way to map how discourses of (dis)ability, gender, and race delimit what we perceive as a human body. More expansively, I contend that perception is just as constructed as gender, with norms of embodiment shaping what we perceive as the boundary between disabled and nondisabled bodies. Shildrick's article then becomes a starting point to ask how we might perceive not just difference but differently, opening up new ways to think and live embodiment.