"Sexual Cripples"

Disability, Sciences of Sex, Ralph Werther

Abstract

This article analyzes the works of Ralph Werther, an androgyne and female-impersonator who lived in America during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Werther’s collaboration with sciences of sex and theories of sexual intermediacy prompt critical reflection on queer and trans studies’ relation to disability and medico-scientific disciplines. How and towards what ends does Werther conceive of sex as itself a dis/enabling property of the subject? What does this historical logic structuring sex suggest about biopower’s investment in gender and sexual non/normativity? Analyzing Werther’s articles, books, and draft, along with physicians’ medico-scientific writings, “‘Sexual Cripples’: Disability, Sciences of Sex, Ralph Werther” argues that critically engaging with strands of ableism underwriting queer- and trans-normative politics is necessary for a less overdetermined historical methodology.