User:Daisyfriedman8/The Sessions (film)

Themes: Disability and Sexuality
The Sessions is based upon, Mark O'Brien's collection of personal essays in The Sun Magazine. In the essays, O'Brien writes from a "crip/queer" perspective to refute his own experience of sexual prohibition as a disabled person. Director Ben Lewin cast able-bodied actor, John Hawkes, as the character of Mark. By doing this, he engaged in a concept known as disability drag. Disability drag is the concept by which an able-bodied actor plays a disabled character. Disability drag reinforces an ableist ideology and states the "disadvantages that disability appears as a facade overlaying ablebodiedness." Disabled people are portrayed in film as incapable of having sex and expressing sexuality. The Sessions shows disability not within the context of rehabilitation, or through the lens of the medical model, but rather foregrounding Mark's sexual experiences as a disabled man. O'Brien also says in the article that he had romantic feels for men and sometimes would experiment with crossdressing. O'Brien's article discusses the effect that societal beauty standards had on his self-image and his image of himself as a sexual being. The Sessions shows both internal and external factors that inhibit disabled people from being connected to their sexuality. It also explores the exclusion from their own bodies that severely disabled people can feel. As a religious man, the intersection of disability and religion is brought up in the film too. Disability is portrayed as a punishment for evil. For O'Brien, this brings about a sense of shame that he is not deserving of sex or sexual pleasure.

One of the main topics of The Sessions is disability and sex surrogacy. Sometimes disabled people who have more pragmatic needs to achieve sexual pleasure seek out sexual assistance by means of sex therapists or sex workers. The film depicts sex between O'Brien and Cheryl, his sex therapist. The romantic bond that formulates between the two characters ensures that the concepts of disability and sex surrogacy are not seen by the audience as as an affectionless act. The importance of location and disabled sex is also brought up in the film. For the first few sessions, Mark and Cheryl use an accessible home of Carmen, a disabled person Mark is interviewing for his essays about disability and sexuality. Sex requires particular settings for disabled people that can require specific technologies or settings to accommodate the person's needs. Disability Studies Professor Rosemarie Garland-Thomson observes that the representation of disabled bodies can be juxtaposed with images of normality to make the disabled body more palpable for the audience. In The Sessions, disability, more specifically, disabled sex, is more easily comprehended by the audience because the visual language in which it is presented in is framed as normal because of the presence of the able bodied character. In the end, the film shows O'Brien as a disabled person who gradually becomes more comfortable with his own sexuality and eventually finds a partner, thus separating him from the other asexual representation of disabled people in film.