The pleasures of care

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.