Suspended Agency
Cripping Judicial Ambivalence to Intellectual Disability and Sexuality
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14296/ac.v7i1.5841Abstract
This article examines how Taiwanese courts suspend the sexual agency of individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities in adjudicating consent. Analyses of key rulings demonstrate how judicial ambivalence—oscillating between protection and denial—produces legal reasoning that pathologizes desire while erasing deeper contextualization. Advancing a crip/queer jurisprudential lens, the article rethinks legal personhood beyond binary thresholds of capacity. It advocates for relational forms of agency that, while seeking justice, recognize expressions and embodiments that may be ambiguous and illegible to the law. This offers critical insights into how disabled sexualities are framed in law, expanding the scope of rights-based analysis.
Keywords: cripness as queerness; disabled sexuality; intellectual disability; judicial narrative; law in context.
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