The Routledge Handbook of Disability and Sexuality - Paperback

by Russell Shuttleworth (Editor), Linda Mona (Editor)

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.

Author Biography

Russell Shuttleworth is Senior Lecturer in Social Work at Deakin University, Australia. An anthropologist, social worker and disability support worker/personal assistant by training, his major research areas include the social and cultural construction of disability and impairment, disability and sexuality and disability and masculinities.

Linda Mona has worked as a clinical psychologist for the VA Long Beach Healthcare System in California, USA, for the past 19 years. As the clinical director of spinal cord injury/disorder psychology, she has prioritised disability affirmative psychological services and sexual health assessment and treatment for people with disabilities.