The Intimate Lives Of Disabled People

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.

Solo parenting, in vitro fertilization, surrogate mothers, gay and lesbian families, cloning and the prospect of �designer babies,� Viagra and the morning-after pill, HIV/AIDS, the global porn industry, on-line dating services, virtual sex--whether for better of worse, our intimate lives are in the throes of dramatic change. In this thought-provoking study, sociologist Ken Plummer examines the transformations taking place in the realm of intimacy and the conflicts--the �intimate troubles�--to which these changes constantly give rise. In surveying the intimate possibilities now available to us and the issues swirling around them, Plummer focuses especially on the overlap of public and private. Increasingly, our most private decisions are bound up with public institutions such as legal codes, the medical system, or the media. What impact does the increasingly public character of personal life have on our sense of ourselves and on how we view our own intimate choices? To navigate our way through a world in which people�s private lives are so often subject to public scrutiny and debate, and in which the public sphere is increasingly pluralized and contested, we must broaden our understanding of what it means to be a citizen. Through the idea of "intimate citizenship," Plummer sets an important agenda for the years to come.

This handbook provides a much-needed holistic overview of disability and sexuality research and scholarship. With authors from a wide range of disciplines and representing a diversity of nationalities, it provides a multi-perspectival view that fully captures the diversity of issues and outlooks. Organised into six parts, the contributors explore long-standing issues such as the psychological, interpersonal, social, political and cultural barriers to sexual access that disabled people face and their struggle for sexual rights and participation. The volume also engages issues that have been on the periphery of the discourse, such as sexual accommodations and support aimed at facilitating disabled people's sexual well-being; the socio-sexual tensions confronting disabled people with intersecting stigmatised identities such as LGBTBI or asexual; and the sexual concerns of disabled people in the Global South. It interrogates disability and sexuality from diverse perspectives, from more traditional psychological and sociological models, to various subversive and post-theoretical perspectives and queer theory. This handbook examines the cutting-edge, and sometimes ethically contentious, concerns that have been repressed in the field. With current, international and comprehensive content, this book is essential reading for students, academics and researchers in the areas of disability, gender and sexuality, as well as applied disciplines such as healthcare practitioners, counsellors, psychology trainees and social workers.

This book will be of interest to undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers in disability studies, childhood studies, medicine and health sciences, and sociology. It also provides insights that will be of use and value to professionals working with disabled children and adolescents in education, health and in disability-specific services. Opening with four narratives that offer the reader a window into the lived experience of disabled children, adolescents and their families, subsequent chapters explore a range of issues facing disabled children from early childhood through to late adolescence. Topics include family life, early intervention, inclusive and post-secondary education, the right to play, digital participation, the effects of labelling and matters relating to agency and sexuality. With chapters discussing research from Australia, Canada, Ireland, Italy, Malta, Mexico, New Zealand, Sweden and the UK amongst others, this book: • contributes to the existing body of knowledge about the lives of disabled children and adolescents, with a focus on socially created disabling factors; • provides the reader with analysis of issues affecting disabled children and adolescents according to different conceptual frameworks, national contexts and with regard to different types of impairments/disabilities; • highlights the main issues that confront disabled children and adolescents, their families and their allies in the early twenty-first century; • highlights the importance of actively listening to the perspectives of disabled children and adolescents. It provides a rich source of knowledge and information about the lives of disabled children and adolescents, and a variety of perspectives on how their lives are affected by material and non-material factors, social structures and cultural constructions.

Living Life to the Fullest forges new understandings of the lives, hopes, and desires of children and young people with ‘life-limiting’ or ‘life-threatening’ impairments. Aimed at undergraduate students, this book contributes to contemporary political and theoretical debates about the human in an age of global precarity and austerity.

Learning Disability and Everyday Life brings into conversation ideas from social theory with “thick” descriptions of the everyday life of a middle-aged man with learning disabilities and autism. This book is markedly ethnographic in its orientation to the gritty graininess of everyday life—eating, drinking, walking, cooking, talking, and so on—in, with, and alongside learning disability. However, preoccupation with, the “small” coexists with a gaze intent upon capturing a bigger picture, to the extent that the things constituting everyday life are deployed as prisms through and with which to critically reflect upon the wider worlds of dis/ability and everyday life. Such attention to the small and the big—the micro and the macro—allows this book to explore the ordinary and everyday ways meanings about normalcy and abnormalcy, ability and disability, are put together, enacted, practised, made (up)—in the sense of constituting and fabricating—and, crucially, accomplished through and between people in specific, and invariably contingent, sociocultural, discursive, and material conditions of possibility. This book will be of specific interest not only to students and scholars of disability but also to persons with lived experiences of disability. This book will also be of interest to students and scholars of anthropology and sociology.

In this exploration of intimate relationships between people with physical disabilities and those without, Rainey shatters the myth of sexless, burdensome partnerships - and in its place reveals a rich and rewarding continuum of emotional and physical intimacies.

This innovative and thought-provoking Research Handbook explores not only current debates in the area of gender, sexuality and the law but also points the way for future socio-legal research and scholarship. It presents wide-ranging insights and debates from across the globe, including Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and Australia, with contributions from leading scholars and activists alongside exciting emergent voices.