Attraction To Disability - History

History

Allusions to this type of attraction are found in, among others, the works of Herodotus, classical Vietnamese legend, works by Bruegel the Elder, de Brantôme, de Montaigne, Pushkin, Brecht, Susan Sontag, J.G. Ballard, Diane Arbus, Bulgakov, Dalí, Hemingway, Mayakovsky, von Stroheim, Helmut Newton and Buñuel, and roles by James Dean. The attraction may be present in the Chinese foot binding tradition.

This type of human sexual attraction has become more widely known over the past century through Interwar decadence, the Sexual Revolution, and the advent of the World-Wide Web. A number of artists have portrayed it: drama producer Andriy Zholdak produces plays with disabled people, sculptor Marc Quinn makes statues of them, photographers Gerhard Aba, Petrina Hicks, Eric Kroll, Ronald Parisi, Romain Slocombe and Yury Solomko portray them, directors produce films like Um crime delicado and Chinese balletomanes produce dance performances with them. The attraction also features regularly in Japanese anime and manga.

The rare pathological attraction to disability has been studied by psychologists since the late 19th Century, with a relative resurgence of interest since the mid-1970s. Until the 1990s, it tended to be described mostly as acrotomophilia, at the expense of other disabilities, or of the wish by some to pretend or acquire disability. Bruno (1997) systematised the attraction as factitious disability disorder. A decade on, others argue that erotic target location error is at play, classifying the attraction as an identity disorder. In the standard psychiatric Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, text revision (DSM-IV-tr), the fetish falls under the general category of "Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders", and the more specific category of paraphilia, or sexual fetishes.