“Cripping” the Future of Sex Essay by Alan Santinele Martino: Crip Futures Collection
Disability Pride Month initially started as a single day of celebration in 1990, the year that the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was signed into law in the United States. The city of Boston held the first Disability Pride Day that year. Then, in July 2015, after years of advocacy, the first official celebration of Disability Pride Month was held, commemorating the 25th anniversary of the ADA. Today, we recognize Disability Pride Month as a cultural and political movement built on decades of international organizing, resistance, and care work.
The Catalyst is a blog and community hub for the work of healers, organizers, artists, and storytellers. Throughout Disability Pride Month, artists, writers, activists, and healers were invited to submit their work for our Crip Futures collection. The following personal essay is by Alan Santinele Martino.
“CRIPPING” THE FUTURE OF SEX: DESIRE, DISABILITY, AND THE RADICAL IMAGINATION
The future is often imagined through sanitized sci-fi storylines in which disability is either eradicated through medical advancement or completely absent. These visions are not only unrealistic but also deeply ableist.
As a queer, disabled scholar who researches sex and disability, I’ve spent years listening to stories that tell a very different tale: one of creativity, joy, and sensuality. A future that insists that disability is not a “problem” to be solved, but a lens through which we might radically reimagine what sexuality, pleasure, and connection can be. In other words, what might it mean to “crip” the future of sex?
THE EROTIC IS CRIP
Audre Lorde famously wrote, “The erotic is power.” For many disabled people, the erotic is also resistance. To desire — and be desired — in a world that routinely denies our sexuality is itself a radical act.
Too often, dominant discourses frame disabled sexuality in terms of risk, dysfunction, or tragedy. We are warned of victimization, shamed for “inappropriate” behavior, or excluded from sex education altogether. In my own research, I’ve seen how this focus on “protection” can easily silence the vibrant and beautiful ways disabled people explore desire.
But when we center disabled people in conversations about sex, a different picture emerges. One of mutual care. Of creative adaptation. Of sensory delight. Of slow, attentive touch. Of DIY sex toys made from dollar store materials. Of kink as access. Of pleasure that isn’t defined by penetration or non-disabled standards of sexual performance. That’s the erotic under a “crip” lens: liberatory, fun, and full of possibilities.
SEX ED FOR THE FUTURES WE WANT
If we want a future where disabled people are free to love, connect, and explore desire on their own terms, we have to begin with how we are taught about sex in the first place. Sex education can influence how we understand our bodies, our boundaries, our pleasures, and our possibilities. It teaches us what kinds of futures are available to us. For many disabled people, however, those futures are either limited or completely absent from the curriculum.
Most sexuality education is designed with a narrow audience in mind. It assumes bodies that move, communicate, and desire in normative ways. Disabled students are often left out altogether, or included only in conversations about risk, safety, and behavior management. The focus is on preventing harm, not cultivating joy. On controlling behavior, not nurturing connection. On deficits, not desires.
“Cripping” sex education is not simply about inclusion. It is about transformation. It asks us to reimagine what education could look like when disabled lives, bodies, and pleasures are at the center. It invites us to create new approaches that reflect the complexity of our experiences and the fullness of our futures.
In arts-based workshops I have co-led with Autistic adults, we have danced to sexy songs, molded desire out of playdough, and used mirrors to reflect on how we see our bodies. These are not just creative exercises. They are ways of reclaiming space. They are glimpses into what a more liberated future could feel like.
“Crip” sex education makes room for communication differences, for sensory experiences, for queer and trans identities, for asexuality, for kink, for multiple ways of feeling and expressing desire. It begins not with what is missing, but with what is possible. And in doing so, it helps build a future where disabled people are recognized as experts in our own sexual lives.
The future of sex is not found in a distant time. It is built in these present moments of learning, unlearning, imagining, and creating together. “Crip” sex ed is not a supplement to mainstream approaches. It is a beginning. A blueprint. A future in the making.
TECHNO-CRIP EROTICS: AI, DEEPFAKES, AND DISABLED DESIRES
We can’t talk about the future without talking about technology. And we can’t talk about technology without asking: who gets to be imagined as desirable?
My recent research has examined how artificial intelligence produces, moderates, and sometimes polices representations of disabled people’s sexuality. From AI-generated dating profiles that erase disabled identity, to deepfake adult content featuring fictional disabled bodies made for non-disabled consumption, we’re at a crossroads.
Do we allow AI to reproduce ableist and sanist norms, or do we intervene?
Perhaps, a “crip” approach invites us not to simply reject tech but to also rewire it. It demands algorithms that reflect diverse erotic imaginaries. It insists on representation created with, not for, disabled people. And it asks: what would it look like to build AI that understands access intimacy, neurodivergent desire, or the pleasures of slowness?
DISABLED PEOPLE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN FUTURISTS
Even when we are left out of dominant cultural imaginations — the sci-fi blockbusters, the utopian manifestos, the sleek tech commercials — disabled people have always been futurists. Not by choice, necessarily, but by necessity. When the world isn’t built for your bodymind, you become an expert in imagining alternatives. You learn how to plan around inaccessibility, how to hack systems not meant for you, how to dream up ways of surviving and thriving in spaces of exclusion.
We know how to plan. How to adapt. How to imagine worlds where our needs are met and our desires matter. We have always been architects of otherwise.
Crip time is a temporal politics of the future. It disrupts the linearity of capitalist, ableist productivity and makes room for rest, pause, and fluctuation. It values the slow, the erratic, the non-normative rhythms of disabled life. And in doing so, it opens the possibility for different futures that are more thoughtful, more relational, and more humane.
Crip intimacy, too, is a redefinition of what counts as love, partnership, and connection. It is expansive, interdependent, and often collective. It includes support workers, chosen family, interpreters, stim toys, body-based communication, and care rituals that do not fit conventional scripts of romance or sex. It is not a fallback from normative coupling. It is an alternative form of erotic, emotional, and relational abundance.
These are not just coping strategies. They are not what disabled people settle for. They are blueprints for better, queerer, more livable worlds. Crip futures do not ask us to transcend the body. They ask us to listen to it. To follow its lead. To create futures that are tender, messy, and built on the radical belief that every body, every mind, every desire deserves space to exist and evolve.
FUTURES WORTH FUCKING TOWARD
“Crip” futures aren’t just about surviving in an unjust world. They are about building new ones. Futures worth fucking toward. Yes, fucking. Not as metaphor, but as practice. As pleasure. As power. As a refusal to let disabled bodies be seen as anything less than fully alive, fully desiring, and fully deserving.
They ask us to embrace vulnerability, not hide it. To see sexuality as relational, political, and full of possibility. They remind us that pleasure is not a luxury. It’s a right. And in the face of systems that say otherwise, we imagine, we create, and we desire anyway.
That’s the power of a sexy “crip” future.
Alan Martino (he/him) is an Associate Professor in the Community Rehabilitation and Disability Studies program at the University of Calgary. His main research interests include critical disability studies, gender, sexualities, and qualitative community-based research. His work has been published in multiple journals, including Disability Studies Quarterly, Sexuality and Disability, and Sexualities. He leads the Disability & Sexuality Lab at the University of Calgary. Alan is passionate about dismantling taboos when it comes to the topic of disability and sexuality.