Call for papers – Disability and sexuality: Desires and pleasures

This special issue takes seriously the arguments by disability scholars that there is an ongoing ‘missing discourse of pleasure’ (Tepper, 2000: 283) in studies of sexuality and disability and that ‘considerations of sexual pleasures and sexual desire in the lives of people with disabilities play very little part in public discourse’ (Shildrick, 2007: 53). The intention of the issue is to develop research that attends to the ways in which the possibilities for sexual desires and pleasures for people with a disability are mediated by social categories such as class, age, gender, ‘race’ and ethnicity in a range of spaces and cultural locations. In so doing, the issue is guided by important interventions in critical disability studies regarding voice, representation and reflexivity such as Shakespeare, Gillespie-Sells and Davies’s counsel that what is required of researchers is to listen to disabled people themselves talking about their sexual desires and experiences (1996: 7). This issue seeks papers that recover historical accounts of sexual desires and pleasures for people with a disability that have been overlooked or discounted. It also seeks papers that explore how possibilities for sexual desires and pleasures for people with a disability are articulated in terms of sex education. In addition it invites submissions that engage with the ways in which new and emerging technologies facilitate and curtail sexual identities, sexual expression, desires and pleasures for people with disabilities. In so doing, the issue will bring the lived experiences of the sexual pleasures and desires in the lives of people with a disability to the fore.