The pleasures of care

Datos Bibliográficos

ID18989656
AutoresSarah Smith Rainey (0000-0001-9656-8300, Bowling Green State University, autor de correspondencia)
Año2018
Volumen21
Número3
Páginas271-286
Fecha de publicación2018-03-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaSexualities (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1363-4607 • E-ISSN: 1461-7382
EditorialSAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/1363460716688677
OpenAlexW2607404897
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas5
Referencias citadas8

In Western culture, pleasure and caregiving seem mutually exclusive. However, in the author’s previous research with people with disabilities and their partners, caregiving emerged as a primary way in which disabled/nondisabled couples engaged in intimacy. Rather than being a drain on the relationship, physical/emotional care brought the couples closer. This article revisits the author’s ‘pleasures of care’ model, focusing on new narratives that explore how the performance of care and ‘technologies of care’ facilitate sexual pleasure. She argues that care is typically experienced as pleasurable when caregiving and receiving have consciously and explicitly been made strange, negotiated, and reframed. In the first section, the author explores how communication can lead to reframing, and how couples that achieve this may also experience a heightened attunement, parallel to the sense of oneness sometimes experienced in sexual encounters. In the second section, she explores how making care ‘strange’ can also be an aspect of kinky sex and sex involving caregiving apparatuses, what she calls the ‘technologies of care’. In relationships involving BDSM, the performance of care can be an integral part of sexual play. ‘Technologies of care’ can be used to facilitate sexual pleasure and contact especially, but not exclusively, in kinky relationships. Rubber gloves, tens units, and Hoyer lifts are all ‘technologies of care’, but they are also the accoutrements of kinky (and some ‘vanilla’) sexual play. By detailing the ways in which care facilitates sexual pleasure, the author hopes to show how the ‘pleasure of care’ can radically rewrite the meaning of disability and power

Aesthetics · Art · Attunement · Cognitive reframing · Human sexuality · Narrative · Pleasure · Political science · Project commissioning · Psychoanalysis · Psychotherapist · Publishing · Sociology · Disability Rights and Representation · Feminism, Gender, and Sexuality Studies · Gender Studies · LGBTQ Health, Identity, and Policy · Medicine · Psychology · Social Psychology

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