The ‘Sexuality Stream’: Exploring Sexuality, Disability and the Human

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SoEResearch

5 min readSep 14, 2016

In early September, Dr Kirsty Liddiard from the School of Education co-convened the inaugural ‘Sexualities Stream’ at the biannual international Lancaster Disability Studies Conference. The conference is renowned for bringing together researchers, students, practitioners, policy makers and disability activists from around the world, to share and debate research, ideas and developments in disability studies.

This inaugural ‘Sexuality Stream’ marked the 20th anniversary of The Sexual Politics of Disability (Shakespeare et al. 1996): a foundational text that was the first to look at the sexual politics of disability from a disability rights and justice perspective. Ground-breaking in its contents and its approach, the sexual stories contained within the covers of the book — told by disabled people themselves for the first time — challenged prevailing myths of asexuality and other tropes which render disabled people as perverse, hypersexual, or as lacking sexual agency.

Despite this scholarly activism, the sexual, intimate, gendered, and personal spaces of disabled people’s lives remain relatively under-researched and under-theorised in comparison to other spaces of their lives. Rarely are disabled people themselves authors or co-producers of this work (Ignagni et al. 2016). Recent austerity policies dominate, further impacting possibilities for intimacy and sexual and intimate relationships with others. Conversely, there is a marked lack of evidence about the impact of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Significant gaps remain, then, in our knowledge of disabled people’s experiences of sex, love and relationships, often in marked areas (Liddiard 2014).

As a response, the ‘Sexualities Stream’ celebrated and encouraged the broad bodies of work that have emerged within the ever-expanding fields of disability studies, gender studies and sexuality studies; it prioritised papers containing original social research as a response to the relative dearth of empirical work within the field. Contributing speakers came from across the UK, Iceland, Canada, and Sweden. Don Kulick, the Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology at Uppsala University, Sweden, gave a keynote based on his new book, Loneliness and its Opposite: sex, disability and the ethics of engagement (2015, with Jens Rydström). Kulick’s keynote, entitled FUCKED: Sex, Disability and the Ethics of Engagement, broadly explored the ethics of care in Sweden and Denmark and the varying impact this has had on the sexual citizenship of disabled people.

Kirsty Liddiard presented a paper entitled, “Like, pissing yourself is not a particularly attractive quality, let’s be honest”: Learning to Contain through Youth, Adulthood, Disability and Sexuality, alongside Dr Jenny Slater from Sheffield Hallam. The paper is being published in a special issue of Sexualities (Pleasure and Desire) later in the year.

Liddiard was also proud to use the ‘Sexualities Stream’ to showcase her work with The Open University’s Sexuality Alliance. The Sexuality Alliance is a partnership including Together for Short Lives, the UK charity for children and young adults with life-limiting, life threatening conditions (LLTCs), and other nationally renowned charities, service users, lawyers, academics and public sector organisations in the UK. The work of the Alliance has led to the production of Talking about sex, sexuality and relationships: Guidance and standards, which aims to provide some key standards for health, social care and education staff working with young people who have life-limiting or life-threatening conditions (LLTCs). It provides information about how best to support young people and their families in addressing sexuality, sexuality expression, relationships and intimacy, providing signposts to useful resources and examples of the law applied to practice. It is not a comprehensive ‘how to’ guide covering every aspect of sex, intimacy and relationships, but aims to highlight some of the key issues that may arise and build confidence in how to approach the issue of sexuality with young people.

Finally, Kirsty Liddiard and the School of Education’s Professor Dan Goodley presented their collaborative DisHuman Manifesto (Goodley et al. 2015), alongside Professors Katherine Runswick-Cole and Professor Rebecca Lawthom from Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU). Some of this work is being developed through the University of Sheffield’s research centre, the Institute for the Study of the Human (iHuman).

ProjectDisHuman is a collective of people who are committed to rethinking the category of the human through disability. Professor Goodley said, “We have been working together for a number of years but came together in 2015 to explicitly articulate our DisHuman manifesto. We combine theoretical and empirical research with activism, campaigning and the arts in order to put into practice the main tenets of our manifesto. In Lancaster we were able to to extend, explain and advocate the potential affirmative offerings of our DisHuman manifesto for the development of critical disability studies now and in the future.”

Click here to access the DisHuman Manifesto, or read our open access article in a special issue of Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education here.

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To read tweets from the Sexualities Stream use the hashtags #Sexualities and #cedr16 together.

Click here to learn more about Kirsty’s research and teaching. You can also tweet @kirstyliddiard1 and/or @ihumansheff.

The ‘Sexuality Stream’: Exploring Sexuality, Disability and the Human

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Further Reading

Written by Education Matters