Men with learning disabilities: Gendered subjectivities

Gender, as a factor of human experience in the lives of men and women with learning disabilities has largely been neglected as an important area of investigation within clinical psychology. Although there have been recent moves to address this neglect by exploring the experience of gender for women with learning disabilities there has been virtually nothing in exploring the implications of gender for men with learning disabilities. This study is a qualitative investigation into how a number of men make sense of themselves in relation to gender and learning disability. Eleven men were interviewed in depth and a discourse analytic method as described by Potter and Wetherell (1987) applied to analyse their accounts. Several interpretative repertoires were defined from the analysis of the participants' accounts and have been described under the following heuristic categories: 'Learning Disability: A construction of inability', 'Learning Disability: Positioned as non-adult', 'The meaning of work', 'Sexual relationships', 'Appeals to 'sameness" and 'Learning Disability: An essentialist construction'. What emerged from the interviews was how, having been positioned within these repertoires, the participants' appeared to experience what can be described as multiple 'fractured' identities at the point of intersection between sometimes conflicting demands of masculinity and disability.