The Intimate Lives of Disabled People ― Sex and Relationships

Despite over thirty years of disability activism and scholarship, disabled people’s sexual identities remain the sum of the paradoxical social categories of 'asexual innocents', or 'perverts’. This timely book explores their experiences of sexual and intimate life within the context of both these constructed sexualities and the wider contemporary ableist cultures which both produce and promulgate them. Foregrounding disabled people’s own sexual stories collected through a participatory and multi-method empirical study, this book provides a richly detailed account of the complex and variegated relationships between sexuality, disability, gender and impairment. The ground-breaking findings to emerge from this study, which take centre stage in this book, not only shine a light on the oppressive darkness in which contemporary disabled sexualities are plunged, but equally both trouble and challenge our current understanding of sexual life as we know it.

Kirsty Liddiard is Postdoctoral research Associate in the School of Education at the University of Sheffield, UK.