Offering a current, comprehensive, and intersectional guide for students, practitioners, and researchers, this book synthesizes existing scholarship on culturally responsive practices that assist in exploring, understanding, and affirming the sexuality(ies) of disabled, chronically ill, neurodivergent, and Mad individuals. Drawing on an intersectional framework, it integrates insights drawn from an interdisciplinary body of scholarship including psychology, social work, sociology, history, political science, women and gender studies, cultural studies, and education along with perspectives from the practitioners who are actively defining the next generation of best practices. By highlighting the incredible resilience and resistance of disabled individuals’ and communities’ sexuality and sexual well-being, this book challenges narratives that rely primarily on a one-dimensional view derived from the medical model and the view of disability as something to be “fixed” – or at least tolerated – rather than celebrated. In a world that pathologizes and devalues the sexual existence of disabled individuals, it illustrates how to create thriving communities and relationships, and how they can organize to find their voice, providing a counter-narrative of empowerment that fosters hopefulness, power, and health. It will be of interest to all scholars, students, and professionals across a variety of professions, including social work, psychology, counseling, policy, healthcare, education, community organizing, and multiple social service settings.

This text aims to increase awareness and knowledge of the issues concerning disability and sexuality. It addresses important topics and emphasises physical problems and their associated psychological consequences.

This collection brings together scholars and artists in disability studies, sexuality, queer theory, and feminism, to show how much sexuality studies and disability studies have to learn from each other.

While the civil rights movement has put disability issues centre-stage, there has been minimal discussion of disabled people's sexuality. This book, based on first-hand accounts, takes a close look at questions of identity, relationships, sex, love, parenting and abuse and demolishes the taboo around disability and sex. It shows the barriers to disabled people's sexual rights and sexual expression, and also the ways in which these obstacles are being challenged. Variously moving, angry, funny and proud, The Sexual Politics of Disability is about disabled people sharing their stories and claiming their place as sexual beings. It is a pioneering work, and essential reading for anyone interested in disability or sexual politics.

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 open access edited volume explores physical disability and sexuality in South Africa, drawing on past studies, new research conducted by the editors, and first-person narratives from people with physical disabilities in the country. Sexuality has long been a site of oppression and discrimination for people with disabilities based on myths and misconceptions, and this book explores how these play out for people with physical disabilities in the South African setting. One myth with which the book is centrally concerned, is that people with disabilities are unable to have sex, or are seen as lacking sexuality by society at large. Societal understandings of masculinity, femininity, bodies and attractiveness, often lead people with physical disabilities to be seen as being undesirable romantic or sexual partners. The contributions in this volume explore how these prevailing social conditions impact on the access to sexual and reproductive healthcare, involvement in romantic relationships, childbearing, and sexual citizenship as a whole, of people with physical disabilities in the Western Cape of the country. The authors' research, and first person contributions by people with physical disabilities themselves, suggest that education and public health policy must change, if the sexual and reproductive health rights and full inclusion of people with disabilities are to be achieved.