Sexual Trauma & Feminist Self-Portraiture in Sex Education

by: Amber Moore , November 10, 2025

Introduction

Sex Education (2019-2023) is a teen television series that follows a group of young British people navigating the complex experiences of adolescence, including dating, identity exploration, family dynamics, friendship, trauma, and, of course, sex and love. Hailed as ‘a bracingly frank look at high school’s busy birds and bees’ (Steuver 2019), ‘legitimately educational … but … never preachy’ (Neuman-Bremang 2021), and ‘one of the queerest teen shows ever’ (Bergado 2020), it wrapped in 2023 with much critical acclaim for its diverse cast, nuanced examinations of intimacies among young people, and progressive politics such as ethically attending to trans characters and issues which the showrunner ‘lost a bit of sleep over’ (Nunn in D’Souza 2023) in an effort to do well. Scholarly examinations of it have emerged from fields including communications (e.g. see Aruah 2021; Dudek et al. 2022; Kornfield & Bassett 2023; Vázquez‐Rodríguez et al. 2021), English (e.g. see Compagnoni 2023), film studies (e.g. see Mayer 2020), queer studies (e.g. see Żerebecki et al 2024), linguistics (e.g. see Zahra and Sujana 2022) and public health (Villarejo-Carballido et al. 2022). As such, it is a cultural text worthy of scholarly attention, especially with respect to its consistent intersectional feminist politics and celebration of discursive ways of coming of age.

The characters under examination here are Aimee Gibbs and Isaac Goodwin. Aimee is an endearing, ‘total sweetie’ (Lavinia 2023) and ferocious friend. She carries a lot of privilege, being able-bodied, cis, fashionable, pretty, rich, straight, and white. And, although she is often understood as ditzy, her critical complexity ‘def[ies] archetypes and tropes’ (Robble 2021) as she is thoughtful, inquisitive, and unique. However, Aimee does struggle: who she dates and what she eats are routinely policed, and early on, her mental health suffers due to her affective-sexual relationship with a possessive and sometimes-violent character (see Villarejo-Carballido et al. 2022). Aimee also becomes a victim-survivor of sexual trauma when she is violated on her regular school bus route in season two. Aimee is traumatised after a stranger masturbates and ejaculates on her. He also ruins both her beloved jeans and a birthday cake for best friend Maeve, which impacts her greatly; as So Mayer argues, ‘The show touchingly, affectively, and haptically takes Aimee’s jeans … as seriously as the teens themselves do: these items of clothing are not just costume but self-fashioning, material objects that manifest their fantasy inner lives’ (2020: 33). Afterwards, she experiences intrusive thoughts, intimacy issues, hyper alertness, and fear. Overall, her general demeanour shifts dramatically until she finally shares testimony with supportive female classmates, and soon others, including Isaac.

Isaac is also a charming, funny, sweet, and ‘self-assured’ (Taylor 2021) character. A disabled artist, he is first introduced as the protagonist Maeve’s neighbour, friend, and one-time love interest. He is notably played by disabled actor George Robinson who, in common with Isaac, experienced a spinal injury during childhood, became quadriplegic, and now uses a wheelchair. The Sex Education creators rewrote the part for George, as the original version of his character had a different disability (see e.g. Taylor 2021). Isaac’s positionality is dynamic, as he lives in a trailer park with his older brother, Joe, after having spent much of their childhood in the foster care system, and having had to work hard to be together. Isaac struggles with dreams of becoming an art teacher and gaining independence, heartbreak from his complicated and brief romantic entanglement with Maeve (who is in love with someone else), as well as near-constant physical access barriers at school.

In the final season, Aimee and Isaac become attracted to each other, and this paper explores that intimacy, with particular focus on how Isaac acts as a critical ally and engages in what can be understood as a cripped witnessing practice in response to Aimee’s grappling with the aftermath of sexual assault that she broadly explores through art. This care work unfolds as Isaac encourages and educates Aimee as an emerging autobiographical, confessional, and feminist artist. With Isaac’s care-ful (Jones et al. 2019) support, how she builds her aesthetics around her own embodied and lived experience of sexual violence is an act of making space for her trauma-surviving brilliance (Piepzna-Samarasinha 2018) as communicated through self-portraiture in photography. Because experiences of sexual violence are typically oppressed—that is, testimonies are usually ‘tainted’ (Gilmore 2016) by disbelief—Isaac’s witnessing of Aimee’s artful processing of trauma then functions as ally work, as he guides her knowledge production on her self-described ‘healing journey’ (S04 E01, 14:26). Ultimately, when they share their art with one another and each creates art with the other’s support, they together produce knowledge and understanding of what it is to be, in Isaac’s case, a disabled young person with familial and socio-economic barriers, and for Aimee, a young woman who frequently experiences sexism, misogyny and rape culture.

Theoretical and Conceptual Frameworks: Feminism, Crip Theory & Witnessing

Feminist Theory 

This project is situated within a broader framework of feminist politics, sensibilities, and theory, and posits that different forms of feminisms offer pathways towards a better world. Feminism is also built around alliances, connections, and kinships; as Sara Ahmed argues, ‘Feminism [is] how we pick each other up’ (2017: 1), which Aimee and Isaac repeatedly show evidence of throughout their relationship. Feminist theory is essential for this project, as it examines the connection between a disabled character and one who is a victim-survivor of sexual assault. As such, feminists who regularly inspire my own thinking are drawn from for this project, including Sara Ahmed (2017; 2019), bell hooks (2009), and Leigh Gilmore (2016). Feminism is deeply connected to and enmeshed with critical disability studies and crip theory as well as in work—artistic, community, political, scholarly, and otherwise—that resists rape culture. Feminist theory has thus provided a necessary lens for creatively and critically considering how Isaac crips his witnessing of Aimee’s testimony, which has in turn inspired both characters as artists and partners.

Crip Theory

This paper also draws on poststructuralist theory and crip theory to analyse Isaac’s cripped witnessing practices, and the impacts of that work. It is important to first attend to the word ‘crip,’ which, reclaimed and reworked from ‘cripple,’ is used by disabled communities to signal some possibilities, including but not limited to defiance, pride, and resistance. According to crip theorist Robert McRuer, this term can (akin to ‘queer’) be understood as meaningfully provocative, informing the capaciousness of crip theory which ‘might function as a body of thought, or as thought about bodies’ (2006: 76). To engage in crip analysis can then mean taking a number of discursive approaches, as crip theory is interdisciplinary in nature and encompasses diverse critical perspectives regarding disability; however, it is largely considered a cultural studies-based approach that emerges from critical disabilities, feminist, and queer studies activism, creativity, and scholarship (Karlson & Rydström 2023). This framework largely hinges on central tenets, including concerns with bodies, combating the insidiousness of ableism, demanding accessibility (broadly understood), claiming and engaging in disability identity politics, interrogating normative thinking, and working towards disabled futures filled with possibilities and promise. As such, the formerly pejorative terms of ‘cripple’ and ‘crip’ are now further mobilised as a verb—that is, cripping can be understood as a creative act which helps to move towards better imagined disabled futures and that ‘actively and boldly inserts disability into conversations and creative explorations where disability was once not present, on the periphery or erased’ (Loebner 2022: 375). For example, Alison Kafer’s (2013) feminist work is threaded through this project, such as her conceptualisation of crip time and politics of cripping imagined disabled futures. It is this notion of cripping that is especially activated in this project, wherein Isaac’s unique cripping of critically witnessing a sexual assault victim-survivor’s artful exploration of her trauma is under examination.

Witnessing

The final framework employed for this project is the concept of witnessing, or more specifically, critical witnessing. This notion is one that I have utilised in previous projects (e.g. Moore 2022) as it is central when engaging with thinking about rape culture(s) and sexual trauma testimony. The terms ‘witnessing’ and ‘testimony’ mainly emerged with the rise of trauma studies, such as with Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s work with Holocaust narratives, in which they address the notions of ‘bearing witness,’ ‘crisis of witnessing,’ and particularly useful for this project, how witnessing can become ‘a critical activity’ (1992: 206). A plethora of scholars have engaged with ‘witnessing;’ for example, to provide just a glimpse at what has especially informed my thinking, consider the following: first, Leigh Gilmore (2016) theorises ‘adequate’ and ‘tainted’ witnesses with respect to women’s testimonies and doubt in particular. Julie Rak (2008), drawing on Felman & Laub (1992), scrutinises the idea that witnessing requires a state of crisis, especially in students learning about trauma through text; also from an education studies perspective, Elizabeth Dutro (Dutro & Bien 2009; Dutro 2008; 2011; 2013) and Michalinos Zemblyas (2006) consider the affective possibilities inherent in classroom critical witnessing. Joeseba Zulaika (2003) theorises ‘excessive witnessing,’ Davidson (2003) and Vogler (2003) consider ‘poetry of witness,’ and Alice Miller (1997) uses the term ‘enlightened’ and/or ‘helping’ witness[es]. Crystal T. Laura (2013) considers how witnessing can be loving, a ‘deliberate attendance to people’ (219). More recently, scholars have continued to mobilise new conceptualisations of witnessing, such as Virginia Necochea’s (2018) racial witnessing and Michael Richardson’s (2024) non-human witnessing. Especially relevant to this project is Oliver Kenny’s (2022) film studies work on the ethical witnessing of extended scenes of controversial sexual violence on screen, which draws on Roy Brand’s (2009) concept of ‘ontological witnessing’ in examining trauma in film. With all this in mind, witnessing is understood here as a critical, creative, and potentially loving act that is both generous and generative.

Cripped Witnessing of Sexual Trauma in Sex Education

Braiding these theoretical and conceptual frameworks together offers a necessarily prism-like lens to appreciate the dynamism of Aimee and Isaac’s bond. Within the context of a blossoming intimacy and shared interest in autobiographical art, Isaac engages in a critical witnessing practice that encourages Aimee’s feminist self-portraiture project, wherein she (re)examines her experience of being violated. Isaac enacts this cripped witnessing while (1) critically reflecting on his own confessional paintings that both mark his experiences as a disabled youth in foster care as well as chart imagined futures for himself; (2) teaching Aimee about other feminist artists, and (3) encouraging her self-portraiture photography.

Critically Reflexive & Reciprocal Artful Sharing

In an early scene focused on these two characters, Aimee visits Isaac at home to learn about art. She pauses on a series of his self-portrait paintings that depict Isaac and Joe in home settings; these works speak to an expansive disability politics as they wrangle with accessibility and care issues that the brothers faced in the foster care system, but also portray their future dreams. In this way, these paintings can be understood as kinds of crip texts—that is, borrowing from Kafer’s analysis of Bernice Johnson Reagon’s feminist essay on coalition politics, they can be read ‘as a narrative of inaccessibility or as an illustration of the insights to be gained from disability’ (2013: 153). While Aimee holds the works carefully so that they can both look, Isaac explains, ‘we moved a lot when we were younger’ (S04 E03 26:25). Later, Isaac reveals to Aimee that they lived in nine different foster homes. This truth recalls Mia Mingus’ (2024) notion of ‘disabled heartbreak’ that can manifest in many ways, including in broken communities and families such as those in which Isaac grew up across the foster care system. Isaac’s first painting also seems to capture this sense of heartbreak, depicting him in an inaccessible yellow home with bright windows. It appears to have been sliced in half to expose the interior. Issac is on the bottom floor, and his brother is on the second; they are separated by stairs. In it, both are dark figures with no identifying details aside from Isaac sitting in a wheelchair at a kitchen table while his brother stands in an empty family room. The house is surrounded by white space.

In the next painting, the brothers are outlined in white paint, but this time they are positioned side by side on the first floor of a home set against a black background. They look out of a large front window, as though they are in a storefront display. This painting could also be understood as Isaac enacting ‘a politics of crip futurity here, an insistence on thinking … imagined futures’ (Kafer 2013: 3) that he and Joe indeed achieved as they now live together in their accessible trailer. Additionally, his art recalls Sara Ahmed’s argument that:

A world has too often been described from the point of view of those who are accommodated. A world might seem open if it were open to you. When we describe the world from the point of view of those not accommodated, a different world appears (2019: 219-220).

As such, Isaac’s ‘imagined futures’ and/or ‘different world’ seem to suggest to Aimee that she, too, can imagine other futures and worlds for herself that she previously thought were off-limits. As Aimee looks, he explains that he wants to move out on his own and perhaps teach art to support himself in another imagined future where he experiences even more independence. However, he is scared to tell his brother about his plans; he ‘[doesn’t] know how to talk to him about it yet’ (S04 E03 26:32) as he is worried about abandoning and hurting him.

As Aimee looks through Isaac’s art, he offers, ‘I suppose I’ve had a lot of anger, growing up in [foster] care’ (S04 E03 26:51), which seems to be a large piece of what his self-portraiture explores. He goes on to reveal, ‘Painting helped me feel less, um, sad’ (S04 E03 26:57-26:59). The third painting especially seems to demonstrate this, as it evokes a sense of how Isaac uses his self/familial portraiture to crip his imagined future by painting an accessible home, thereby forging a space where both he and Joe can be together—something the foster system did not manage to find for them. Aimee seems to agree and/or understand this immediately, and they share a meaningful silence. A moment later, Aimee tries to reciprocate this intimate sharing by offering a humorous anecdote about burying her mom’s jewellery in the garden whenever she’s angry. This is when Isaac laughs and tells her, ‘You’re a maverick’ (S04 E03 27:10), that Aimee doesn’t ‘think like other people’ (S04 E03 27:24-27:25). When she wonders if this means that she is stupid, he reassures her that no, it means she’s her own person. Her eyes shine in delight, as she is often misunderstood and underestimated. Then they almost kiss, cementing their amorous interest beyond platonic friendship. Unfortunately, Joe interrupts them, and Aimee quickly scampers off. Later, Isaac texts Aimee that he had fun with her.

Several items are significant about this scene, and are indicative of what informs Isaac’s cripped witnessing practices, including how it spotlights the embodied art-making that Isaac uses for his self-portraiture and shares with Aimee, how Isaac opens up and offers some critically reflexive sharing that also functions as reciprocity for the art she will eventually make, and how Isaac allows Aimee to explore his art at her own pace, during which he deems her a ‘maverick.’ To begin with, Isaac engages in a mouth painting tradition (e.g. see Critchley 1994; Fortuna 2017) using mouth sticks—that is, an oral prosthesis that some disabled people use to engage in a variety of activities such as art-making, grasping or moving objects, and writing (Toor (nee Bachoo), Tabiat-Pour & Critchlow 2015). Because he paints with his mouth sticks clenched between his teeth, his process can be understood as deeply embodied, physical work. The subject of his art is also about his lived experience as a disabled and displaced young person who experiences many access issues and encounters much ableism. Isaac’s art can also then be further understood as an example of Eli Clare’s notion of ‘brilliant imperfection,’ which allows Clare to do things like offer lovers unique intimate physical pleasure due to tremors or, when hiking, discover that his ‘shaky balance gives [him] this intimacy with the mountain’ (2017: 88). This very much connects to, and seems to inspire, Aimee, as her self-portraiture explores sexual trauma and includes bodily performance art/photography that is also particularly situated in spaces and places connected to that trauma. Another important tenet of crip theory that resonates across Isaac’s art is the understanding of disability identity as fluid (Kafer 2013; Abrams and Abes 2021), which certainly presents in these three starkly shifting representations of where Isaac has had different lived experiences where he has been placed in different dwellings with varying levels of accessibility (like the first two paintings), and creates other possibilities (like the third painting).

Additionally, Isaac seems to discuss his paintings with Aimee happily, patiently, and reflexively, providing a kind of personalised ‘guided tour.’ Allowing Aimee to move through his work in her own time and go further into his experience, process, and trauma is significant in the context of someone who has been sexually violated, where a component of the violence enacted includes the removal of choice. Moreover, in Aimee’s experience, her violation happened very suddenly and was over quickly, almost as if she didn’t fully comprehend what had happened until the perpetrator had gone. And so, Isaac’s allowing of Aimee to take control and move into his personal and political self-portraiture in her own time is significant. It can also further be read of Isaac’s employment of a kind of ‘crip time, which resists the disabling pace of life’ (Abrams & Abes 262). As Kafer describes, crip time is a ‘reorientation to time,’ a ‘flex time’ that ‘requires reimagining our notions of what can and should happen in time’ (2013: 27). It is ‘an essential component of disability culture and community’ (2013: 26). Because crip time ‘bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds,’ perhaps Isaac draws on this to encourage a bending of the clock to meet Aimee’s victim-survivor body and mind better.

Finally, one of the crucial elements of this scene is when Isaac calls Aimee a ‘maverick.’ A maverick is a sort of outlier figure, and the term originally meant ‘unbranded cattle’ and comes from a Texan cowboy named Samuel Maverick who allowed his cows to roam freely, unmarked; as such, the word now functions as a metaphor for those who similarly make their own way in the world (Strong 2021). To add to Isaac’s description of a maverick as someone who is a unique thinker, Amanda Barusch, who writes about maverick archetypes for older women, argues that such individuals also ‘expand the degrees of freedom enjoyed by others’ (2022: 61). In this way, Isaac is perhaps also offering this characterisation to Aimee as a way to compliment her on the ways that she opens him up, makes him think differently, and in turn, perhaps experience an increased sense of freedom— both artistic and otherwise.

Artful Advice about Feminist Self-portraiture

It is during art class that Isaac invites Aimee over to talk about art. When she arrives, it is immediately apparent that Isaac is invested in her and intends to introduce Aimee to a variety of genres, other maverick artists, as well as feminist self-portraiture specifically; in his words, ‘it’s about finding the right expression for you’ (S04 E03 16:44-16:46). He also is quick to interrupt her self-doubt about ‘getting’ art and makes a connection between her love of baking and decorating cakes, assuring her that she is ‘basically’ doing art in the kitchen. A moment later, Aimee notices an image that captures her attention, asking, ‘is that someone’s bed?’ (S04 E03 17:10). Isaac breaks into a smile and tells her this is the work of, in his words, ‘badass’ (S04 E03 17:25) artist Tracey Emin. He immediately encourages her to explore such artists and self-portraiture because, from his perspective, many female artists seem to enjoy it. In response, Amy pauses to provide unique insight on why this is, offering: ‘maybe it’s because people don’t see them as they really are’ (S04 E0317:35-17:37). Isaac furrows his brow as though this has just occurred to him and agrees. Thus, in this moment, they co-create knowledge about understanding(s) of selves and perceptions. Isaac offers artful advice to Aimee on her healing journey, and in return, she challenges and inspires him to think and perceive things differently.

Isaac soon gives her a camera and teaches her how to use it (e.g. how to use the dials to focus, the aperture, self-timer, etc.) in a patient, non-judgmental way, even as she struggles to remember to take the cap off the lens before shooting; he also happily explains to her that film needs to be developed in a dark room. Aimee soon starts taking pictures, including those of other people, such as Isaac himself and her friend Otis. She asks Otis’ permission first, and after coaxing him not to pose—to ‘do nothing’—she comments, ‘weird. Not bad. But weird’ (S04 E04 26:21-26:24), shaking her head with curiosity. This moment connects back to when Isaac and Aimee first get to know one another in art class, and Isaac admiringly calls Aimee’s portrait of her childhood friend, Melon, ‘really weird. Lovely, but just quite weird’ (S04 E02 35:37-35:44). In both moments, the ‘weird’ is a curious compliment offered with a reassuring tone that affirms they are not at all offering that comment in jest or as mockery. In this way, Aimee seems to explicitly adopt and enact the ethic of care that Isaac employs while doing and talking about artmaking: a truthful yet kind approach.

However, Aimee primarily focuses on self-portraits during her ‘healing journey,’ notably first in her bedroom, much like Tracey Emin. ‘My Bed’ is an installation piece that Emin debuted in Tokyo in 1998 (Cherry in Kokoli & Cherry 2020) that ‘evoked the metaphorics of the rumpled bed for us’ as a kind of ‘bed autobiography’ (Smith and Watson 2001: 2). In it, Emin displays her dishevelled, unmade bed with white sheets, on her blue carpet and several other items beside her bed that recount a few days that Emin spent in it. As Isaac describes it, ‘That’s what her bed looked like after she’d had a depressive episode;’ he then shakes his head in admiration, continuing with, ‘And then she put it in a gallery’ (S04 E03 17:23-17:25). This notion of staying in bed is essential to many disabled people; as disability studies activist, artist and scholar Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha argues, ‘beds are worlds’ (44) and as disabled artist Melinda Montgomery explains of her self-portraits in bed, ‘My bedroom is my escape from the world when I need to free my mind … This is my sacred space’ (Montgomery in Macdonald et al. 2022: 250). And so, because Aimee goes on to use her bed as a starting point for her art project, she not only engages with an important space and place for disabled folks, but also wrangles with one that is sometimes fraught within the context of engaging with rape culture as a subject.

Finally, returning to the moment in Sex Education discussed above where Aimee sits in a car with her friend Otis, taking his picture, she tells him, ‘I actually think I want to take photos of myself. Isaac showed me these amazing self-portraits that I really liked’ (S04 E04 26:54-27:10). She then continues with, ‘Yeah, I really don’t know what I’m trying to say yet, with the self-portraits, which is annoying. Because, say with Isaac’s work, for example, it really means something’ (S04 E04 27:23-27:28). At this, a knowing look spreads across Otis’ face as he recognises the significance of Isaac’s presence in Aimee’s life; he sees that Isaac is connecting to and inspiring his friend. When Otis offers that she should try to ‘trust her instincts’ (S04 E04 27:53) with her art, Aimee’s eyes widen and she remarks, ‘That’s exactly what Isaac says!’ (S04 E04 27:55). This moment then demonstrates just how much Isaac’s advice and support are encouraging Aimee to create art and learn about herself, so much so that Otis recognises how meaningful her new relationship is. This is just one example of the myriad ways in which Isaac supports the self-portraiture photography journey that she is just beginning. This is especially significant considering how, in disability scholarship, emphasis is sometimes placed on creative deliverables rather than creative processes (Loebner 2022). Later, when Aimee starts developing some of her first photos in the school’s dark room, she admits that she still doesn’t know what she’s saying with them, to which Isaac laughs and playfully assures her that she never stops talking and definitely has plenty to say. He emboldens her to stop underestimating herself, to which Aimee pauses, says ‘thank you,’ and seems to grow a little emotional, touched by his words. As such, Isaac’s support of Aimee’s journey towards her feminist self-portraiture photography is meaningfully invitational, inspiring her to create a series of works where she explores her ‘healing journey’ from sexual assault.

Supporting Self-Portraiture Photography

Once Aimee is armed with a camera and a lesson from Issac, she begins her self-portraiture project. First, we see Aimee setting up her camera on a tripod to take self-portraits on her bed. She leans in closely to check the camera, as Isaac taught her. The first flash surprises her, and she sits back. In silk pyjamas and pigtail braids, Aimee perches on her bed, shutter release in hand. Reminiscent of Emin’s aesthetics, her bed is also littered with stuff: a box of tissues, books, and sex toys, among other items. Then, she poses by tilting her head, smiling, and holding a purple dildo beside her face. A quick montage follows Aimee posing with her chin in her hands and then holding what appears to be another small, red sex toy for clitoral stimulation. The prominence of sex toys in Aimee’s art very much connects to the contemporary art world; for example, consider Portia Munson’s painted pink dildos (Munson 1996), Laurie Simmons’ emotive photographs of sex dolls (Lokke 2011), Jen Stein’s political transformations of dildos (Joshi 2020), artist and popstar Peaches’ sex toy art show (Loiseau 2019), and even Paul McCarthy’s controversial inflatable ‘Tree’ installation that he admits ‘was somewhat inspired by an anal plug’ (McCarthy in The Associated Press). Aimee’s emergent self-portraiture is in rich creative company. And so, while this scene is brief, it conveys the dizzying speed with which Aimee takes to self-portraiture as she creates highly personal, provocative, and arguably feminist work that centres her comfort, space, sexual expression, and—particularly in her sex toy selfies—female pleasure.

The subsequent significant development of Aimee’s art project happens suddenly. While driving home from a funeral, she spots a garden with a huge collection of gnome statues and immediately screeches to a halt. Mouth agape, she grabs Isaac’s camera and scrambles out, accidentally honking her car horn in her excitement. In what might be described as a kind of tiptoe run, she, to all intents and purposes, trespasses to get closer and explore. She is soon taking pictures of—as well as selfies with—a gnome that, she realises in delight, looks like her grandmother. Significantly, she is drawn to these gnomes, which are somewhat iconic fixtures across westernised suburban landscapes (Duggan 2016) and are sometimes ‘considered the embodiment of bad taste’ (Mayer 2012: 287), cultish, and ‘garish kitsch’ (288). They are, though, meaningful due to the whimsical symbols of domesticity that they carry, as well as being understood by many as ‘pleasant, agreeable, and indispensable’ (Londos 2006: 294). Being transfixed by garden gnomes is congruent with Aimee’s character because she, too, is at once beloved and treasured, often gazed upon and understood as ornamental, as well as sometimes dismissed and overlooked. Returning to the scene, unfortunately, her photography session is interrupted by construction workers who harass her, catcalling for ‘a smile’ and to ‘cheer up’ when her face falls, realising what’s happening. Indeed, as bell hooks has argued, ‘Street corners have always been a space that has belonged to men—patriarchal territory. The feminist movement did not change that’ (2009: 143). However, Aimee confronts them, screaming: ‘I’m not smiling because I’ve just been to a fucking funeral! I’m also not smiling because you’re fucking talking to me! You fucking fucks!’ (S04 E06 53:07-53:20). Shaming them into apology, Aimee quickly holds up her camera and, in a risky act of guerrilla photography, she takes their picture before storming off. It is almost as if she is emboldened by her art project and Isaac’s encouragement to see herself differently—that is, perhaps more generously and generatively, to speak back to this manifestation of rape culture that she experiences in this moment.

This is hugely uncharacteristic for Aimee, marking a shift from her usual people-pleasing behaviour. For example, at one point, she admits that she hates fighting and making people feel bad, so she just tells everyone what they want to hear. Usually, she never wishes to cause disruption unless it is for the right cause, such as ditching toxic friends or standing up against ableist practices in school that affect many, including Isaac. However, in this moment where she is the one being harassed, it is meaningful that she responds so powerfully. It is also evidence of Ahmed’s assertion that sexual harassment ‘is material: how it is a system that secures access to women’s bodies; how it consigns women to some places and removes women from others’ (2017: 207). Aimee’s furious storming into the street to scream demonstrates her challenging their efforts to pin her under their gaze, their power; indeed, ‘feelings can be a site of rebellion’ (246). This moment seems to continue to embolden her, as the next time we see Aimee, she is again in her bedroom, brainstorming. In a journal, she writes: ‘WHAT I WANT MY ART TO SAY’ in pink marker and lists the following ideas: ‘Things that make me ANGRY!’ ‘Men telling me to smile!’ and ‘Women shouldn’t be SCARED!!’ (S04 E06 57:16). Suddenly, she pops up and grabs the jeans she was assaulted in and starts smiling; an idea has come to her for the next phase of this art project.

This third, and arguably the pinnacle, of Aimee’s feminist self-portraiture project begins shortly after a moment where she reflects on missing an opportunity to kiss Isaac and explains her hesitance to him: she is still processing her trauma after the assault. He immediately reassures her that he’s glad she has told him. She then immediately leaves to work on her most intense images yet by revisiting the jeans in which she was violated. Returning to Mayer, although the jeans represent complicated trauma, her work with them is a kind of reclamation and a way to find her way back to this ‘beloved object’ (2020: 34). It is worth pausing to mention that this subject matter is also significant because, much like her experimentation with the sex toy self-portraiture, moving towards self-portraiture with her jeans is in keeping with an artistic feminist tradition of working with clothing that victim-survivors were violated in. For example, many galleries have featured ‘What Were You Wearing?’ exhibits that showcase such clothing (e.g Edwards 2024; Vaginanos 2017). Returning to Aimee, she first takes a series of self-portraits with her jeans, which she shows to Isaac. For example, one she highlights is taken of her in the bath, her jeans hanging over the edge of the clawfoot tub. Again, her head is tilted to one side, resting on the porcelain, and she stares at the ceiling. As she shows Isaac this picture, she tells him, ‘I keep meaning to throw [the jeans] away, but for some reason I can’t’ (S04 E07 11:24). As she looks down at other self-portrait photos she’s developed where she’s either in the jeans or with the jeans, she reveals, ‘Every day I start to feel more like myself, which is great. But sometimes, it feels like even when I’m doing something I love, like eating ice cream, it feels like I’m still wearing [the jeans]. Like it never goes away’ (S04 E07 11:40-11:53).

During this sharing, Aimee starts to cry while holding up another couple of photos for Isaac to look at. In the first, she looks directly into the camera, lying on the floor of her bedroom in her jeans with her legs propped up against her bed. In the next scene, Aimee is wearing her jeans again in her room, this time standing in her window seat with a microphone and appears to be singing. Isaac listens attentively to her sharing and looks back and forth between the photos and Aimee. A moment later, Aimee reveals, ‘So yeah, this is my idea [for an art project]’ (S04 E07 12:09). Isaac quietly, firmly and in a paced manner responds with: ‘These. Are. Brilliant’ (S04 E07 12:11-12:12), which again, as with the previous time they were in the dark room together, makes her smile and say, ‘Well you’ve helped so much’ and affirms that he’s ‘going to be such a great teacher.’ Isaac thanks her but says, ‘This is all you’ (S04 E07 12:13-12:17). Again, this scene demonstrates how Isaac has established a caring trust with Aimee such that she is willing to feel safe enough to open up about her assault and how it continues to impact her. He is an attentive listener who seems mindful not only of what is said, but also of what is not, including moments where she pauses, the looks she offers between words, and the overall rhythms of her speech. This is significant because while she has shared what happened with some trusted girlfriends, victim-survivors generally keep their assault experiences largely private. Isaac’s cripped witnessing practices have clearly opened a space for Aimee to offer her testimony to him in meaningful fragments, in her own time, and in an arts-based manner.

Next, Aimee plans a larger place-based photoshoot and performance piece with her jeans at the bus stop where she was assaulted. She arrives dressed in her jeans and sets the camera on a tripod with the timer, as Isaac taught her. Then, she takes a series of images, posing at the bus stop, such as one where she is sitting with her arms and legs spread wide, looking straight into the lens. Her approach begins with a confrontational aesthetic as she moves around the bus shelter to capture different angles. However, the climax of this performance is when she strips off her jeans and burns them, dancing beside and smiling as she moves. Her dancing is restrained at first, with slight swaying and little kicks, before she begins rolling in a more carefree manner around the fire with a relaxed smile. At the end, she laughs a little and cries what seem to be happy tears before screaming in triumph, her hollering echoing into the next scene. It is worth mentioning that, similarly to when she moved into the street to confront the construction workers who were sexually harassing her while at the same time, photographing the gnomes, in this performance, she again takes over the road with her burning and dancing. Considering this art performance takes place immediately after she was affirmed for setting a boundary about consent with Isaac, it can be read as partially a result of Isaac’s careful, cripped-witnessing practice. It appears she is now brave enough to take this next step with her art thanks to Isaac’s encouragement. And, because this performance includes a great deal of joy with Aimee’s dancing, play, laughter, and even a scream of ‘Woohoo!’ (S04 E08 55:59), it brings to mind Piepzna-Samarasinha’s question, ‘what if some trauma wounds really never will go away—and we might still have great lives?’ (2018: 143).

Concluding Thought

This paper will conclude where we are largely left with Aimee and Isaac: at the beginning of their romantic relationship, just as it enters a physically pleasurable stage. Near the end of the series, it is fitting that their first kiss takes place in the school’s darkroom, in which they develop their photography. In there, Aimee straddles him and he assures her, ‘we can go at whatever pace that you want’ (S4 E08 1:09:14). Here, Isaac offers a masterclass in consent and tangible support for a victim-survivor of sexual violence, balancing being careful with her without treating her too delicately. Truly, he seems to be an embodiment of Schroeder’s claim that ‘Disabled people know how to love like no others’ (Schroeder in Wong 2024: 23). Then, when they start kissing, Aimee accidentally touches his wheelchair and it beeps and moves; she laughs, saying ‘oops’ (S4 E08 1:09:39) and he laughs too, demonstrating that their intimacy is playful and kind. It is also worth noting that, indeed, as argued by disabled and sexual assault victim-survivor Petra Kuppers, ‘Many disabled people are sexual innovators, finding intimacy and pleasure in unusual spaces’ (2022: 499). This scene showcases the intentional pace of their relationship and how they have artfully and meaningfully developed it to this point. And so, if we were to imagine Aimee and Isaac’s art displayed together in a gallery setting, they would arguably complement each other critically and creatively. This is due to how their works bridge both disability concerns (e.g. ableism and accessibility) and feminist concerns (e.g. rape culture) by drawing particular attention to the power of embodied and lived experiences, testimony and witness, and social justice threaded throughout this storytelling. They demonstrate that art and artmaking can be a significant site for care and coalition-building, pleasure, and possibility.