Overprotection and intersectionalities regarding the sexuality of young women with disabilities: nuances between care...

This article aims to discuss how the intersection of gender, disability, and social class, within the context of care relationships, can impact the sexual rights of young women with disabilities. This qualitative research was conducted in the metropolitan region of João Pessoa, Brazil, with four participants through in-depth interviews. It analyzed the lived experiences related to sexuality in the youth of cis-heterosexual women with physical disabilities during the 2000s and 2010s. The theoretical-analytical framework was grounded in intersectional approaches from the fields of care studies and disability studies. This study highlights the challenges and coping strategies adopted by the participants as forms of resistance to socially imposed norms of body normality (corponormativity), which position them as exclusively dependent and infantilized. Within care relationships, these stereotypes give rise to behaviors of discouragement or oppression in their affective and sexual lives, as well as in other dimensions of social life. Discourses and practices associated with care, when distorted into overprotection, operate as mechanisms of control over the sexuality of young women with disabilities.