‘Facefuck Me’: exploring crip porn

ABSTRACT

In this article, I examine the 2019 Himeros.tv porn scene ‘Facefuck Me’ to consider the meanings and representations that congeal around disability, sex, and pornography. This scene depicts well-known porn star Pierce Paris face-fucking Kenneth Connin, a young gay man with quadriplegia. I am interested in the pedagogical functions that porn serves for non-normative sexual practices and subjectivities, and rather than interpret this scene in a passive and reductive sense, I suggest that there are several aspects that connote its transgressive and crip potential. Examining crip representation, crip sexual agency, and crip sexual mobility, I make the case that we need to see more disability pornography. This does not adhere to a non-crip ‘add-and-stir’ inclusion and normalization agenda, but more to exposing disability in multiple ways such that multiple, and hopefully efficacious, interpretations emerge. My interest is in broadening the meanings of sexuality and sexual practices, and of foregrounding the sexual subjectivities of disabled people that are otherwise negated. Pornography, I contend, provides the perfect platform for this sort of endeavour.

KEYWORDS:

• Disability porn
• crip porn
• disabled sexuality
• crip theory
• disability representation
• disability studies

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their incredibly helpful and critically productive comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 One interesting exception is some instances of bareback porn where many of the performers are coded as HIV-positive. Such scenes could be legible as disability porn (see Dean 2009), yet, for many reasons I wish to explore in future work, have not been widely recognized as such.

2 Clare (2015) argues that disabled people are so routinely asexualized that any experience of sexual objectification is a powerful marker, no matter how damaging, of sexuality and sexual subjectivity.

3 Such approaches contribute to non-crip normalizing principles and practices that re-instantiate disabled people’s abject status.