Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Over the last decade, devotees—people sexually attracted to amputees—have increasingly found a home for themselves, and their desires, on the internet. Typing “amputee devotee” into any search engine results in thousands of websites, with titles ranging from “ampulove” to “ampix” to “hotsexyamps.” As the titles suggest, many of the online sites feature photographs and videos of amputees, stories of amputee sex, and passionate defenses of devoteeism from people involved in the phenomenon. Several US-based sites, often those owned by women amputees, host message boards, list classified ads for those looking for an amputee or devotee partner or lover, and advertise weekend conferences where amputees and devotees can meet. Amputees are often invited to attend these conferences at no expense, with the mostly-male devotees footing the bill.

Devotees have consistently been portrayed in medical literature as pathological; their desire for amputees is typically cast as an abnormality requiring explanation. People with disabilities have, understandably, been troubled by this assumption that “normal” people do not find such bodies attractive or desirable. As a result, disabled people are often wary of criticizing devoteeism, fearing such critiques would be seen as supporting the attribution of pathology to the desire for disabled bodies. What this wariness means, unfortunately, is that the gendered power dynamics of the amputee-devotee community have not been thoroughly explored from a feminist disability studies perspective. How are we to understand the fact, for example, that most devotees are men, or that heteronormative conceptions of masculinity and femininity are rampant in discourses of devoteeism?

Even less critical attention, however, has been paid to the transnational dimensions of devoteeism. Thanks to the internet, devotees are able to access image sites located all over the world; devotees have created a transnational online archive of treatises, definitions, and defenses of the attraction; and amputee-devotee conferences—most of which are located in the United States—often attract amputee women from other countries. Do constructions of disability identity shift through these transnational encounters between amputees and devotees, or among amputees and among devotees? Can amputee-devotee conferences be understood as another site of transnational sex tourism, but one in which males pay females to travel to them? What are the possibilities for transnational feminist alliances between disabled women involved in these communities, either as critics, participants, or both?

In this paper, I draw on feminist disability studies and transnational feminist theory to trace the circuits of pleasure and power circulating through these communities. I explore the role of desire and disgust in devoteeism, tracing the ways in which devotees present amputee bodies as desirable only to devotees, echoing ableist assumptions that most people find disabled bodies disgusting. The interplay between desire and disgust becomes even more complicated when viewed from a critical transnational perspective. American devotees often describe non-American amputees as especially desirable; these women are exotic not only because of their limblessness, but also because of their non-American location.