Call For Abstracts: Anthology on Sex and Disability
>
>
>             Disability and sex come together in multiple ways.  In the
> popular imagination, however, the terms "sex" and "disability" are, if not
> antithetical, then certainly incongruous.  To many, the idea of people
with
> disabilities as sexual or sexy remains largely unthinkable. We are
> soliciting proposals for a cultural studies anthology of essays that will
> challenge such conceptions, examining, revising, and extending the myriad
> ways that disability and sex intersect.
>
>             We seek submissions that build on existing scholarship on sex
> and disability but take this work in new directions, attending to the
> sexiness of sex; to the specificity of disabled bodily enactments,
> sensations, and experiences; and to the relation between disabled sex and
> social, cultural, and representational structures.  While disability
> scholars in the social sciences have made important initial steps in
> formulating conceptual models of sexual access for people with
disabilities,
> complementary work in the humanities or across disciplinary boundaries
> remains largely undone.  In the social sciences and in activist
communities,
> discussions about sex and disability have focused primarily upon local,
> practical issues: for example, controversies about "sex surrogates,"
> arguments about the meaning of "consent" for people with severe cognitive
> disabilities, and analyses of strategies disabled people have used to
access
> sexual experience.  In the humanities, in contrast, conversations about
sex
> and disability have emphasized the formation of positive disabled
> identities: critiques of negative or stereotypical representations of
> disabled people's sexuality and analyses of disabled writers' and artists'
> responses to these representations have predominated.  As such, this
latter
> body of work has arguably been more concerned with "sexuality" than with
> "sex."  We envision an interdisciplinary collection of essays that extends
> all of this work, that talks about sex, theorizing it as an embodied
> phenomenon and engaging in critical analysis of its social and cultural
> representations.
>
>              This analysis, we hope, will challenge, redefine, and rework
> constructions of either "sex" or "disability" as stable categories.  The
> apparent stability of either of these categories has historically been
> linked to their containment within private or personal spheres.  By
forcing
> a recognition of disability as a political process rather than a private
> problem, the disability rights movement has achieved significant success
in
> securing disabled people's access to public spaces.  But if wheelchair
ramps
> and ASL interpretation are increasingly coming to be understood as
> appropriate public accommodations, the conjunction of sex and disability
> continues to be seen as an improper or unseemly private matter.  We
> therefore seek essays that analyze enactments of "sex" in multiple
locations
> and thus undo the public-private distinction as it pertains to both sex
and
> disability.  Moreover, we are interested in work that conceives of
> disability not as a discrete and stable identity category, but rather as a
> shifting and contingent set of bodily practices and experiences, which
> always come into being within a broader political context.  In particular,
> we seek writing that investigates the ways in which the politics of race,
> class, gender, and sexual orientation shape both enactments and
> representations of sex and disability.
>
> > Possible topics include:
>
> *Historical constructions of disabled people's sexuality;
>
> *Eugenics and the sterilization of disabled people;
>
> *Analyses of sex and disability in literature and culture;
>
> *Queer theory, feminist theory, critical race theory, psychoanalytic and
> other theoretical approaches to sex and disability;
>
> *Amputee devoteeism and other forms of disability fetishism;
>
> *Transgender and intersex identities;
>
> *Obscenity controversies; sex and disability in pornography, erotica, and
> performance art;
>
> *Disability and cybersex or online personals;
>
> *Impotence, erectile dysfunction, and "frigidity" as disabilities;
>
> *"Sex addiction" as medical and social category;
>
> *Legal cases regarding disabled people's rights to access sex;
>
> *Sexual surrogates;
>
> *Disability as a barrier to, or enhancement of, sexual experience;
>
> *Sex in institutions, nursing homes, and group homes;
>
> *Attendants, privacy, isolation, and the use of assistive technology to
> access sex;
>
> *Sex and mental illness;
>
> *The sexuality of cognitively disabled people;
>
> *Deaf studies and blind studies perspectives on sex;
>
> *Chronic illness and sex.
>
>
> Abstracts of 250-500 words by July 1, 2005 to Anna Mollow
> ([log in to unmask]) and Robert McRuer ([log in to unmask]); preferred
format
> is Microsoft Word attachment.
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>