Folks, for all of you writers out there, this may be an opportunity to show
your stuff.  I belong to an online email group called Society for Technical
Communicators (STC) as I used to be a tech writer for IBM and this group has
a special interest group called Accessibility.  The recommended topics are
all subjects we have discussed both online and off I'm sure.  Good luck to
all those who participate!

Thanks, Bettina "Crack a smile, its nature's best addictive medicine.
Laughter is like inner jogging".

-----Original Message-----
From: Gail Lippincott [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Tuesday, April 19, 2005 11:07 PM
To: STC AccessAbility SIG
Subject: [stc-accessibility] Call for abstracts: Anthology on Sex &
Disability

From: Anna Mollow <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Sat Apr 9, 2005  12:11:44 PM US/Pacific

Apologies for cross-postings!
Please circulate widely.

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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