Bringing disabled women together, mobilising
and sharing through lived experiences

This is a call for Papers for the Lancaster Disability Studies Conference 2016

The foundational text, The Sexual Politics of Disability, was ‘the first book to look at the sexual politics of disability from a disability rights perspective’ (Shakespeare, Davies and Gillespie-Sells, 1996: 1). Ground-breaking in its contents and its approach, the sexual stories contained within the covers of the book – told by disabled people themselves – challenged the prevailing myth 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. Where austerity policies dominate, we are unsure of how this impacts the possibilities for intimacy and relationships. Conversely, we lack evidence about the impact of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Significant gaps remain in our knowledge of disabled people’s experiences of sex, love and relationships, then, often in marked areas.

This inaugural sexuality stream marks the 20th anniversary of The Sexual Politics of Disability (1996). In this stream, we aim to celebrate and encourage the broad bodies of work that have emerged within the ever-expanding field of disability studies, gender studies and sexuality studies. For this stream, we will prioritise papers containing original social research, as a response to the relative dearth of empirical work within the field.

We are thrilled to have Don Kulick, Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology at Uppsala University, Sweden, as keynote speaker. His books include Travesti: sex, gender and culture among Brazilian transgendered prostitutes (1998), Fat: the anthropology of an obsession (2005, edited with Anne Meneley), Language and Sexuality (2003, with Deborah Cameron) and most recently Loneliness and its Opposite: sex, disability and the ethics of engagement (2015, with Jens Rydström).

We welcome papers on the following themes:

1. Identity and imagery: masculinities, femininities, Queer and Trans* identities
2. Intersections of gender, race, sexuality, class, nationality, age, and religion/faith/spirituality.
3. Sex education and sexual health
4. HIV/AIDS
5. Pleasure, sensuality and desire
6. Sexual and bodily esteem, confidence, self-worth and self-love
7. Impairment, embodiment and corporeality
8. Psycho-emotional disablism
9. Barriers to sexual expression
10. Youth
11. Parenting
12. Learning disability and sex/uality
13. Mental health, distress and intimacy
14. Intersections of personal assistance, residential and social care, and intimacy
15. Sex work and sex industries
16. Sexual, emotional and intimate-partner violence
17. BDSM, kink, and fetish
18. Online and cyber sexuality
19. Sexual drugs, enhancements and technologies
20. Human rights law and disabled sexualities
21. Researching sex/uality: data collection, methodology and analysis
22. Theoretical contributions: Critical Disability Studies, Feminist disability studies; Queer Theory; Crip Theory; Posthuman and DisHuman studies.

Contributions that reflect on any of these themes are invited from academic and non-academic researchers, scholars, activists, and artists. These themes are indicative only, and we will consider proposals that fall outside them so long as these relate to the overall conference stream. We welcome offers of traditional academic papers (20 minutes max) and also welcome proposals and presentations in alternative and/or creative formats (e.g. film, animation, poetry). Submissions should be made through easychair and please specify you wish to be considered for this stream.

If you have any other questions, don’t hesitate to get in touch with Kirsty: k.liddiard@sheffield.ac.uk.

Please see here for the Mad Studies stream and here for the main conference call for papers.

Kirsty Liddiard is on Sisters of Frida’s Steering Group. She is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate within the Centre for the Study of Childhood and Youth,  at the University of Sheffield, working on a transdisciplinary research project entitled Transforming Disability, Culture and Childhood: Local, Global and Transdisciplinary Responses. Prior to this post, she was the inaugural Ethel Louise Armstrong Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Disability Studies, Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada.