Phantom Pleasures: The Eroticization And Contestation Of The Amputated Body

Analyzing the ways that the bodies and desires of amputees and their admirers have been represented and rationalized in medical, scientific, and psychoanalytic texts, the author tracks the ways that these bodies and pleasures are pathologized, eroticized, and criticized across historical and social terrains. In an attempt to create a nuanced portrayal of the experiential discourses of the lived person at the intersection of disability and sexuality, the author then examines the ways in which people situate themselves in relation to these structures of truth and knowledge.
It becomes increasingly evident that the amputated form operates as a site upon which and within which multiple collective, material, and political fantasies are manifested and contested, where boundaries and oppositions are reinforced and ruptured.
The eroticization of the amputated form can, in many ways, act as a revelation. It produces a fissure in the myth of normalcy that opens up alternate ways to figure bodies and desires, and in so doing, unlearning inherited notions of ability and desirability, and reconstituting a norm that creates unity and liveability, enabling life through practices of inclusion, rather than exclusion.