Sexuality on Screen: A Feminist Disability Studies Reading of Izzy Armstrong in Coronation Street

Why soap operas, and Coronation Street more specifically?

Television’s influence on cultural attitudes towards disability is well documented, with Ellis and Goggin (2015) emphasising its role in framing how disability is understood and represented. Over 91.5% of UK households own a television set (Ofcom 2023), and the average television viewer consumes 2 hours and 17 minutes of television per day (Office for National Statistics 2023). Coronation Street commanded weekly viewing figures of almost 3.9 million in September 2026 (Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board 2026), underscoring the deep embedding of television and soap operas in everyday life. Bignell (2008, 210) argues that television reflects and interacts with the culture and society it exists within, conferring ‘some meanings and not others’ which are then applied in ‘complex ways’ to shape viewers’ experiences and understandings. When this sentiment is applied to Coronation Street’s popularity and significant cultural footprint, it confers considerable power to shape public discourse. Importantly, for Bignell (2008), soap operas like Coronation Street are more than mere entertainment; in many contexts, they act as cultural texts that can reflect, reinforce, or challenge societal attitudes and norms.

Blose (2020, 34) argues, ‘television in particular, among other media, influences millions of viewers daily, including the way women see themselves and how they construct their identities’. The routine and serialised format of Coronation Street enables sustained engagement with characters and storylines and builds on Brunsdon’s (1997) earlier observation that soap operas are routinely associated with female audiences. ‘By allowing us to share in the lives of others, entertainment can excite and educate us, can make us imagine, think and feel in ways we may not otherwise have a chance to experience’ (Cohen 2006, 183, quoted in Blose 2020, 34). Coronation Street provides a unique space where complex social issues – including intersections such as gender, sexuality, class, and family – can be negotiated and contested.

Given the cultural power of soap operas in shaping public attitudes and countering ableist attitudes (Jenkins and Cabas-Mijares 2025), Coronation Street provides a critical case study for exploring representations of disabled women’s sexuality. Since Coronation Street’s debut in 1960, it has tackled a wide range of social issues – from domestic abuse to mental health – establishing itself as one of the most culturally significant and influential programmes in the British soap opera genre. The programme’s use of social realism (Livingstone 1989), depicting the routines and relationships of everyday life in a working-class Northern community, cultivates a sense of familiarity and trust in viewers. This positions Coronation Street as a powerful cultural medium through which audiences engage with and make sense of complex social issues, including disabled women’s sexuality.

Contrary to a legacy of progressive storytelling, Coronation Street has historically fallen short in representing disabled characters, particularly disabled women, in sexual or romantic roles. The inclusion of Izzy marked a notable departure from this trend, and Houston’s casting in 2010 signalled a watershed moment for disability representation on mainstream British television, as she was the first disabled actor to be cast in Coronation Street and remains on-screen to this day. Her continued presence, therefore, affords an unparalleled opportunity to critically explore the ways in which disabled women’s sexuality is represented. In this way, Coronation Street provides a valuable case through which to examine how the representation of disabled women’s sexuality is evolving within the soap opera genre while advancing the field of disability and sexuality studies by foregrounding soap operas as a crucial site of disability representation.

Destabilising asexuality and invisibility

Early in her storyline, Izzy was portrayed as a confident, flirtatious, and romantically desirable woman, initially appearing as Kirk Sutherland’s love interest, who later developed a romantic relationship with Gary Windass. It was during this long-term relationship with Gary, a non-disabled man, that audiences were presented with a rare portrayal of a disabled woman as both sexually active and emotionally complex. For example, these early scenes focused on Gary and Izzy’s mutual attraction, dating, and plans for a future together rather than defining her character through her disability. Through this, Izzy directly challenged reductive stereotypes and media myths about asexuality and sexual invisibility (Christian et al. 2020; Liddiard 2018) by positioning her within the ordinary emotional landscape of soap opera life – a disruption of representational norms (Brunsdon 1997). Izzy became located within conventions of romance, intimacy, conflict, and reconciliation in a manner that normalised disabled women’s participation in romantic and sexual relationships. In this way, this arc challenged Tepper’s (2000) observation that the media privileges non-disabled representations of sexuality.

This disruption, however, is not without tension. Jenkins and Cabas-Mijares (2025, 251) argue that ‘sexualized visual representations of disabled people in media attempt to fit disabled bodies into hegemonic understandings of desirability. In doing so, they reinforce hierarchies of disability, as the disabled bodies that can be more easily assimilated into ableist notions of beauty receive more visibility and, thus, more sociocultural value’. This visibility was not secured by rejecting dominant ideals of attractiveness but rather by aligning Izzy’s representation with normative ideals of femininity, romance, and desirability. For example, her early storyline scenes with Gary foregrounded their mutual attraction, emotional intimacy, and sexual relationships, which were largely normalised and presented in much the same way as romantic storylines involving non-disabled characters. It was through these conventions that Izzy’s sexuality became legible. In this way, Coronation Street integrated Izzy’s romantic life into its broader romantic framework, offering a more inclusive and realistic portrayal of disabled women’s sexuality. By resisting the common pathologisation of disabled women, this initial framing affirmed the capacity for disabled women to experience loving, emotionally intimate, and reciprocal sexual relationships.

Yet when situated in conversation with Jenkins and Cabas-Mijares’ (2025) earlier argument, Izzy’s representation appears less disruptive than initially perceived. Textual analysis reveals that through storylines which positioned her within familiar conventions of heterosexual romance, coupledom, domesticity, and motherhood, Izzy’s sexuality was represented in a culturally acceptable way for soap opera audiences. Consequently, Izzy’s sexuality and desirability were framed through what Jenkins and Cabas-Mijares (2025) argued are hegemonic understandings, and as such, the limits of ostensibly progressive representation are revealed.

Medicalisation: pregnancy and miscarriage

Izzy’s early-onset departure from dominant media tropes is significant but short-lived. As her storylines developed over time, particularly with the introduction of her pregnancy, familiar cultural misunderstandings around disability and reproductive capacity risked being introduced. While Izzy’s pregnancy and miscarriage offered further complexity to her character by portraying her as a disabled woman with reproductive and maternal desires, textual analysis reveals that the framing of this arc raises representational challenges as disability and pregnancy were not considered separately. Rather, they were co-constituted through recurring discussions of medical risk and uncertainty. For example, the storyline centred on consultations with healthcare professionals in which there were discussions about Izzy’s disability and the associated risk of carrying a child. This repeatedly foregrounded medical concerns about danger and uncertainty, rather than the everyday experiences of pregnancy. In her influential work on feminist and disabled motherhood, Carol Thomas (1997, 627) argues that if medical discourse believes ‘there is a risk of abnormality, or the risk of worsening an already abnormal bodily condition, then steps must be taken to avoid it’. This discourse was seen within Izzy’s early pregnancy and scenes with medical consultants and in this way, contributed to the pathologisation of disabled women’s motherhood onscreen.

Izzy’s pregnancy arc culminated in her experiencing a miscarriage, a decision which then positioned reproductive loss as the principal outcome of disabled pregnancy. Medically, women with conditions such as Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, like Izzy, do face increased risks during pregnancy (Kang et al. 2020), and in this sense, the plot remains grounded in realism and aligns with the programme’s social-realist ontology. Nevertheless, the miscarriage storyline – focusing heavily on medical risk and culminating in a miscarriage – shaped a portrayal in which disabled pregnancy appeared especially fraught. In this way, the issue is not the miscarriage itself, but the framing of disabled pregnancy through risk and loss, which speaks to Garland-Thomson’s (2005, 1567) observation that disabled women are ‘often stereotypically considered undesirable, asexual, and unsuitable as parents’.

Yet, rather than developing a long-term storyline around successful pregnancy and disability, Coronation Street resolves Izzy’s maternal storyline through miscarriage and surrogacy. This shift is significant because the possibility of disabled motherhood through a successful pregnancy was, instead, replaced by a storyline centring risk and loss and one which led to an alternative route to parenthood. In this way, this resolution foreclosed the possibility of representing Izzy as a biological mother. Rather than depicting motherhood as a negotiable or an ongoing aspect of disabled women’s lives, this scripting decision echoed biomedical discourses which associate disabled motherhood with risk and vulnerability. Thomas (1997, 632) argues that such risk is not neutral but based on ‘social assumptions about the quality of life and intrinsic value of children and adults with impairments’. In this way, pregnancy was not presented as a viable reproductive experience, and with surrogacy as the only resolution, it reflects not only medical realism but also wider cultural assumptions concerning the value of disabled motherhood.

While acknowledging that the storyline was sensitively performed, Izzy’s miscarriage emphasised loss and grief, with little attention comparatively given to reproductive agency. In this way, the miscarriage’s emotional arc can be seen as drifting towards sentimentality, inviting a reading of pity rather than a portrayal grounded in resilience, complexity, or agency. This shift in representation reflects cultural understanding in which disabled women’s reproductive experiences are situated within frameworks of loss, risk, and tragedy, rather than as sites of nuanced subjectivity or resistance to normative femininity. This constrains cultural imaginations and limits how disabled women’s reproductive agency is understood and represented. While characters like Toyah Battersby and DeDe Bailey on Coronation Street – both non-disabled – have also experienced miscarriage or infertility, their storylines are more often situated within arcs of recovery and hope. In contrast, Izzy’s miscarriage remained tethered to impairment and medical risk, meaning that her experiences of pregnancy loss were read in conjunction with cultural assumptions concerning disability and reproductive incapability. In this way, representations of loss, risk, and tragedy can reinforce ableist assumptions unless carefully contextualised and ultimately do little to disrupt the normative, able-bodied ideals that FDS seeks to critique.

Reproductive agency and surrogacy: tension, limitations, and constraints

Following the miscarriage, Izzy and Gary’s decision to pursue surrogacy marked a further significant storyline turn as it disrupted conventional reproductive norms and the affirmative reframing of disabled women’s agency. While surrogacy positioned motherhood as achievable for Izzy, storyline attention shifted away from grief and loss associated with miscarriage and instead, towards the emotions and practicalities associated with navigating surrogacy. From the outset, the surrogacy arc challenged dominant cultural ideologies that equate womanhood with biological motherhood and reproductive ability; core assumptions that FDS scholars Garland-Thomson (2005) and Kafer (2013) explicitly critique. By presenting surrogacy as a viable and legitimate route to parenthood for Izzy, Coronation Street gestured towards a more inclusive vision of reproductive possibility, pushing back – at least in part – at deficit-based narratives that often depict disabled women’s reproductive desires as inappropriate or unrealistic and thus problematic (Liddiard 2018).

However, textual analysis suggests that this gesture towards autonomy and empowerment was complicated by the storyline’s framing, which spanned several months. Although presented as Izzy’s choice, over these months, there were recurrent discussions of risk and medical intervention using fertility specialists. This foregrounding risked invoking a familiar trope: the disabled woman as a passive patient rather than an autonomous subject (Liddiard 2018). In doing so, Coronation Street complicates the very agency it appears to affirm, inviting audiences to interpret surrogacy as shaped more by clinical intervention than by Izzy’s autonomy. Thus, even as the storyline contributed towards disrupting certain norms, it continued to reproduce others, highlighting the complexities of representing disabled women’s reproductive agency within soap opera long-form arcs.

Moreover, this tension reflects broader critiques within FDS, which address not only representational tropes but also the structural and ideological barriers that restrict disabled women’s access to reproductive justice, leaving them to ‘battle to claim motherhood’ (Garland-Thomson 2005, 1572). Representing surrogacy as a deliberate and autonomous choice made by Izzy and Gary allows Coronation Street to challenge ableist and heteronormative definitions of family and positions disabled motherhood as legitimately possible. However, this gesture towards empowerment is complicated by the storyline’s reliance on medical intervention, which both centres and privileges the recommendations of healthcare professionals, implying that disabled motherhood is only viable through their recommendations. By positioning doctors and medical technology as mediators of viability, the storyline risks perpetuating ableist assumptions that Izzy’s body is insufficient on its own and that medical expertise is required to validate her capacity for motherhood. This also risks constructing disabled bodies as diminished (Goodley 2017) and aligns with Garland-Thomson’s (2005) observation that disabled women are routinely marked as subordinate in cultural and representational frameworks.

This framing also resonates with longstanding FDS critiques of the ways medical discourse often positions disabled women as passive recipients of care, rather than as active agents and decision-makers in their reproductive lives (Garland-Thomson 2002; Wendell 1996). Within such discourse, medical authority routinely overrides and displaces disabled women’s embodied knowledge and lived experience, operating through (mis)assumptions of vulnerability and the need to control their reproductive capabilities (Jenkins and Cabas-Mijares 2025). Reproductive decisions are thereby constructed as matters to be determined for disabled women rather than with them, reinforcing their dependence on expert oversight.

These discursive effects operate simultaneously, demonstrating how long-form soap opera storylines that appear empowering can, nonetheless, risk reproducing and embedding ableist ideologies – resonating with Lappeteläinen, Sevón and Vehkakoski’s (2017, 140) argument that disabled women are ‘seen as disabled first and mothers second’. On one hand, soap operas like Coronation Street can offer representations that challenge dominant assumptions by portraying disabled motherhood as possible and legitimate, offering valuable counter-narratives to stereotypes of asexuality or incapacity. Yet, conversely, these representations are often bound up within medical authority and heteronormative ideals of family, which risk reinscribing ableist assumptions despite appearing progressive. The result is a contradictory representation where motions towards empowerment coexist with the reproduction of cultural narratives that constrain disabled women’s reproductive agency.

Building on these representational tensions, it is also important to consider what the surrogacy storyline leaves unspoken – specifically, the broader structural and material realities that shape disabled women’s reproductive lives. In practice, access to fertility services is often limited by prohibitive costs, with IVF (In vitro fertilization) and surrogacy remaining inaccessible to many disabled women who already face disproportionate levels of poverty (see Caballero Pérez and Guzmán Rincón 2025; Kim, Parish, and Skinner 2019). There are also geographic disparities in terms of access to reproductive healthcare for all women, not just disabled women (Fertility Network UK n.d.). Taken together, these socio-economic constraints risk obscuring the material inequalities that continue to shape disabled women’s reproductive lives off-screen as they shape who can realistically access reproductive technologies and under what conditions.

After ruling out the possibility of Izzy carrying a pregnancy herself, the storyline presented a simplified resolution in which non-disabled neighbour, Tina McIntyre, agreed to act as a surrogate in exchange for a predetermined financial arrangement. This decision sidestepped the complexities of bodily autonomy, medical access, class privilege, and systemic exclusion. Instead, surrogacy was portrayed as a straightforward, neighbourly solution, which was problematic in that it obscured the structural inequalities noted above. Little attention was afforded to the legal and institutional barriers that frequently shape surrogacy arrangements; instead, the storyline centred on the emotional tensions between Izzy, Gary, and Tina. Despite this, the surrogacy arc is particularly significant because it risks positioning disabled embodiment as incompatible with pregnancy and risks validating disablist assumptions that disabled women cannot or should not carry pregnancies themselves. Thomas (1997, 636) argues that ‘disabled women are often assumed by professionals and lay people (often including close relatives) to be incapable unless they can prove otherwise: guilty until proven innocent’. Thomas’s claim remains pertinent to Izzy’s surrogacy as it reproduces a cultural representation of disability as a barrier to biological reproduction.

Nevertheless, despite such limitations, the surrogacy storyline achieved something rare: a mainstream portrayal of disabled women’s sexuality and reproductive agency. This enacted resistance to normative embodiment, affirmed sexual and parental autonomy, and ultimately expanded the range of bodies that constitute a viable family structure.

Disabled women as mothers

Significantly, Izzy’s motherhood role extended beyond the surrogacy arc into a co-parenting storyline with Gary, which remains ongoing at the time of writing. Through this sustained, long-form arc of disabled motherhood, her co-parenting enabled her to fulfil the everyday responsibilities of motherhood and represented one of the earliest soap-opera portrayals of a disabled woman successfully navigating parenthood within a complex family structure (Wilde 2021). Noting that ‘motherhood remains an area of social life through which disabled women are at best excluded and at worst abused’ (Liddiard 2018, 52) and that ‘motherhood denotes caregiving while disability suggests a woman in need of care herself, and thus unfit to assume the caring role for another’ (Vaidya 2015, 519), representing Izzy in this way challenges dominant framings that disabled women are inherently unfit for parenthood.

Moreover, through this representation, disabled women are (re)configured as parents with caregiving capacity and authority in a way which is congruent with the everyday realities of motherhood. This allows viewers to observe the mundane aspects of disabled motherhood while challenging dominant ideologies associated with the nuclear, able-bodied parenting model (see McRuer 2006). It affirms that parenting is not contingent on able-bodiedness but is rooted in a broader, more inclusive understanding of care, competence, and interdependence. For example, Izzy’s co-parenting relationship with Gary normalises interdependence through shared responsibilities and decision-making as their child develops. However, when Gary has left the soap for a sustained period of time – for work, or prison – Izzy is positioned as the primary parent reliably present to navigate mundane family life by taking responsibility for their son’s day-to-day care and schooling. This challenges (mis)assumptions that disabled women are dependent on others (Liddiard 2018) through a representation of dependability and capability.

Izzy’s co-parenting arc also reconfigures cultural assumptions about parental fitness, caregiving, and gendered responsibility as she becomes increasingly associated with emotional competence, relational care, and the everyday complexities of parenting. This challenges what Malacrida (2009, 113) identifies as a ‘distinct cultural ambivalence to the idea that women with disabilities are capable, and perhaps even entitled, to perform ideal mothering’. In this sense, Izzy’s motherhood arc contributes to a broader reimagining of how disabled motherhood can be represented onscreen. Taken together, these storylines illuminate the legitimacy of disabled motherhood.

Through enduring aspects of Izzy’s motherhood that have unfolded and been repeatedly revisited over the years, Coronation Street has offered a vision of disabled parenting that is ordinary, competent, and emotionally rich. Textual storyline analysis suggests that long-term visibility is important, as sustained representations of disabled women in familial roles can resist disablist constructs of deficiency, dependency, and maternal unfitness. Izzy’s sustained representation as a mother reflects a move towards more complex, humanising, and experientially grounded representations of disability – an outcome essential for challenging the simplification, marginalisation, and storyline erasure of disabled women in media, and, more specifically, soap operas.

Yet while Izzy’s sustained onscreen presence as a co-parent marks significant progress in challenging reductive portrayals of disabled women, Izzy’s expansion into motherhood and co-parenting came at a representational cost: her sexuality was sidelined in favour of a caregiving/motherhood storyline. For example, Gary has subsequently entered several romantic relationships with Alya Nazir, Sarah Platt, Nicola Rubinstein, and married Maria Connor. Izzy’s desirability has not been foregrounded in the same manner as when she entered the show with no notable romances since Gary. Textual analysis suggests that, following the birth of their son, Izzy’s parenting was framed in terms of sacrifice, selflessness, and maternal responsibility, with a long-form storyline centring her maternal responsibilities and navigating her co-parenting relationship with Gary. Her co-parenting role has been visible across the years; however, her romantic relationships are comparatively infrequent. Through this narrative shift, motherhood emerged as the primary framework through which Izzy’s sexuality was represented. Contextualised, Izzy’s parental legitimacy comes at the expense of sustained expressions of sexual identity or desire.

Consequently, by treating disabled women’s sexuality as plot-driven rather than embedding it as ongoing, Coronation Street normalises disabled motherhood but at a cost of sustained representations of sexuality within long-form character arcs. The result is a representational tension in which Izzy is a caregiver and mother, but only partially recognised as a sexual being.