Sexuality in diversity or diversity in sexuality? New challenges for a new sexual culture

Abstract

In this paper we take a look at a small representation of what plurality in sexuality implies. Examples, such as that of women, people with functional diversity, and people of other sexual orientations and/or gender, show that there is no single sexuality, but that there are as many sexualities as there are people. People with functional diversity have suffered and suffer discrimination in all aspects of life, including sexuality.

That is why, in December 2006, the United Nations approved the International Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. The sexuality of women, men, and those who do not identify with sex-gender binarism, but all of them with functional diversity, tend to experience sexuality in a way which is to a certain extent, distorted. They are persons who are considered asexual, and consequently, treated in a infantilized way throughout their life cycle (especially, women with physical, deafblind, intellectual and/or developmental or mental diversity); or, on the contrary, some of them, in particular, women with intellectual and/or developmental or mental diversity, are interpreted as hypersexual persons who do not know how to control themselves. However, if we want to open the normative horizon to sexuality, to its science and its practices, we will include from a social and rights perspective a multiplicity of realities that are diverse sexualities, but which would traditionally have been pathologised and treated from the perspective of a disease model.

Keywords: Sexuality, diversity, sexology, functional diversity, sexual rights.