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The chapter examines how gender and disability render women with disabilities incapable of love in the eyes of society and often in the eyes of law. Feminist and disability rights movements have not adequately addressed multiple discrimination against disabled women. The discourse on love reveals how gender and disability as two identities get pitted against each other for women with disabilities. While women, often assumed to be caring, loving and nurturing, are fighting against imposition of roles of wives and mothers, women with disabilities are denied these very roles. Persons with disabilities are often viewed as asexual, dependent and incapable of or uninterested in love. This chapter examines how the intersectionality of sex and disability operates to deny access to love to girls and women with disabilities. It focuses on three sites of love: sexuality, marriage, and parenthood. The chapter examines the social and legal barriers that hinder accessibility to love at these sites. For example, performance of forced hysterectomies on disabled girls exemplifies the denial of sexuality, relationships and roles of love to women with disabilities. The chapter looks at Indian legal framework to examine how law has also supported such denial, for example by facilitating divorce or denying child custody on the grounds of disability. By denying access to these sites of love, the society and law continue to deny disabled women basic values of intimacy, relationships, self-expression and love. This chapter argues for an approach based on the social model of disability that focuses on elimination of such barriers and creation of support mechanisms to enable disabled persons to access and enjoy love.
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