“Too Fucked Up”

The article argues that contrary to mainstream investments in promoting sex and sexuality as healthy and beautiful, attending to sexuality’s awkward and ugly expressions and considering how disabled and disfigured bodies engage in sex are fruitful enterprises. To that end, the article tracks the intertwining of ugliness and deformity with sex, sexuality, and sexual desire through a close reading of Charles Burns’s 1995–2005 comic series Black Hole , in which teenagers contract a sexually transmitted infection, “the bug,” that disfigures them. The article suggest that the bug is a site wherein disability, sex, and queerness converge. Supplementing this close reading, the article engages with extant scholarship on Burns’s comic as well as with queer theorists—particularly those queer theorists classed as “antisocial,” like Leo Bersani—and disability studies scholars—especially Alison Kafer and Anna Mollow—to consider broader critical-theoretical implications for reading sexuality and disability as convergent experiences. The article concludes by suggesting one such implication: reading disability and sexuality in the same site reorients the centrality of the body insofar as it is the matrix on which disability and sexuality merge, and this centrality runs contrary to the dominative heteronormative schema for relationality and intimacy.