Seema* (24), a student of vocational training at Vidya Sagar Centre for Special Education in Chennai, lives with intellectual disabilities. She often asks her mother, “why are people my age getting married and I am not.” We asked her why she wanted to get married. “We will be happy,” she says simply.
Conventional and patriarchal thinking has made it so that marriage provides women social security, which explains why it becomes aspirational for disabled women as well, studies say. Marriage also becomes a “legitimate” space to explore sex and sexuality.
For disabled persons, especially those with psychosocial disabilities, marriage has less to do with intimacy, companionship, and sexuality, notes the paper Sexual Rights of Women with Psycho-social Disabilities: Insights from India. “Some of the primary motives include marriage as a cure for illness, a source of unpaid long-term care, assurance for old age, and so on.” This is particularly true for disabled men for whom marriage to socially “undesirable” women, those widowed or divorced, or those with a lesser degree or hidden disability is seen as a solution for long-term care.
It is different for women living with disabilities who are not seen as “worthy” investments by families, noted Renu Addlakha. So, families may conceal the woman’s disability, especially if it is invisible as in the case of a psycho-social disability, to get her married. But, she added, once marital families discover the disability, and possibly her inability to perform gendered roles, it could lead to abuse, abandonment, or even the annulment of the marriage. Even for disabled women who have social and economic privileges such as a good education and job, the escape from the gendered expectations – to give birth or manage household chores – becomes difficult, said Venkataraman.
Sometimes conversations about marriage do not include the women themselves. Shikha*, a student in Delhi in her early 20s who lives with a locomotor disability, says people tend to talk over her in this regard. “People address my family instead and from a point of concern. ‘Who will marry her?’ they ask,” she said. Her mother had often warned her that people may “use” or “exploit” her or be with her out of sympathy. “I don’t think she is entirely wrong,” she said.
But conversations around disability and sexuality are now growing. Nu demands more spaces where disabled persons, including queer individuals, can be themselves, express anger and all emotions that make them human. “I would like to work towards a world where someone like me could also be a Carrie Bradshaw from Sex and the City,” Nu said.
*Names changed to protect identity
[This is the sixth report on the series on violence and exclusion faced by women and trans persons with disabilities in India as part of the Spotlight Media fellowship. The fellowship is a collaboration between Rising Flame and BehanBox. You can read the previous reports here, here, here, here and here.]