Disabilities, Pleasures, and Sexualities: Transforming Perceptions, Cultivating Desires

Disabled sexuality has too often been cast as taboo, as disabled people are routinely de-sexualized, infantilized, or positioned as objects of pity and (over)protection. Nevertheless, despite facing numerous obstacles to sexuality, sexual expression, and parenting, individuals with disabilities have consistently showcased resilience, agency, and creativity.

Disabilities, Pleasures, and Sexualities: Transforming Perceptions, Cultivating Desires, volume 17 of the Research in Social Science and Disability series, seeks to highlight and celebrate these qualities with contributions that challenge stereotypes, reimagine expressions of sexuality, illuminate aspects of reproduction and parenting, and explore different forms of intimate relationships. They recognize, affirm, and celebrate the reality that many disabled people already live full and fulfilling erotic lives. With contributions that foreground the lived experiences, representations, and self-understandings of disabled people as sexual beings, some contributions explore how disabled individuals and communities resist the social, cultural, and political forces that render their sexualities deviant, invisible, or dangerous. Other contributions turn to the urgent task of transforming sex education, critically examining how sex education for disabled people can be radically transformed. Finally, there are a number of pieces that highlight how disabled people navigate the affective, embodied, and increasingly digital landscapes of intimacy and connection.

In sum, this volume imagines sexuality as a site of access, interdependence, creativity, and joy, in hopes that it reshapes the broader sexual cultures in which we all participate.

Dr. Alan Santinele Martino (he/him) is an Associate Professor in the Community Rehabilitation and Disability Studies program in the Department of Community Health Sciences at the University of Calgary. His main research interests are in disability, gender, and sexualities; feminist and critical disability studies theories; qualitative and community-based research (particularly participatory and inclusive research methodologies). His work has been published in multiple journals, including, for example, Disability Studies Quarterly, Sexuality & Disability, and Culture, Health, & Sexuality, as well as edited volumes focused on disability and/or sexualities studies. He is the lead of the Disability and Sexuality Lab at the University of Calgary.

Dr. B. Ethan Coston (they/he) is an Associate Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, Associate Editor (LGBTQ+ Health) for the American Journal of Public Health, and Founding Director of The Sexual Health Exploration Project. For more than 15 years, Ethan has been collaborating on and leading projects to improve 2SLGBTQIA+ health and wellbeing, strengthen disability justice, and promote equity in medical care and health services. Informed by diverse frameworks and approaches, Ethan’s work calls into question what we think we know about health and well-being, and demands that health-science does better for all of us.

Dr. Ann Fudge Schormans (she/her) is a Professor Emeritus in McMaster University’s School of Social Work. Drawing on critical disability studies and other theoretical lenses, her scholarship and research centre on qualitative, arts-based, knowledge co-production. Working collaboratively with people labelled/with intellectual disabilities, research foci include intersections of intellectual disability with youth homelessness; sex, sexuality, reproduction and parenting; feminism; masculinity; violence; (self)advocacy and activism; friendships and inclusion; media representation; and intergenerational learning and knowledge creation among survivors of institutions and younger people labelled/with intellectual disabilities. Publications include two co-authored books, papers in edited volumes and in journals such as British Journal of Learning Disabilities, Gender, Place & Culture, Studies in Social Justice and Canadian Journal of Disability Studies.