Kirsty Liddiard

Project Re•Vision: disability at the edges of representation

The representational history of disabled people can largely be characterized as one of being put on display or hidden away. Self-representations have been a powerful part of the disability rights and culture movement, but recently scholars have analysed the ways in which these run the risk of creating a ‘single story’ that centres the experiences of white, western, physically disabled men. Here we introduce and theorize with Project Re•Vision, our arts-based research project that resists this singularity by creating and centring, without normalizing, representations that have previously been relegated to the margins. We draw from body becoming and new materialist theory to explore the dynamic ways in which positionality illuminates bodies of difference and open into a discussion about what is at stake when these stories are let loose into the world.

The work of disabled identities in intimate relationships

This article details a thematic analysis of disabled men and women’s accounts of past and present intimate relationships. Drawing upon the sexual stories of 25 disabled people, informants’ intimate relationships are explored as a site of emotional work, and as a site of other forms of (gendered) work. This article critically questions the work carried out by informants and considers the ways in which it was shaped by their lived experiences of gender, sexuality, impairment and disability. The article concludes that the requirement to carry out forms of work within intimate and sexual life constituted a form of psycho-emotional disablism.

The DisHuman child

ABSTRACT In this paper, we consider the relationship between the human and disability; with specific focus on the lives of disabled children and young people. We begin with an analysis of the close relationship between ‘the disabled’ and ‘the freak’. We demonstrate that the historical markings of disability as object of curiosity and register of fear serve to render disabled children as non-human and monstrous. We then consider how the human has been constituted, particularly in the periods of modernity and the rise of capitalism, reliant upon the naming of disability as antithetical to all that counts as human. In order to find a place for disabled children in a social and cultural context that has historically denied their humanity and cast them as monstrous others, we develop the theoretical notion of the DisHuman: a bifurcated complex that allows us recognise their humanity whilst also celebrating the ways in which disabled children reframe what it means to be human. We suggest that the lives of disabled children and young people demand us to think in ways that affirm the inherent humanness in their lives but also allow us to consider their disruptive potential: this is our DisHuman child. We draw on our research projects to explore three sites where the DisHuman child emerges in moments where sameness and difference, monstrosity/disability and humanity are invoked simultaneously. We explore three locations – (i) DisDevelopment; (ii) DisFamily and (iii) DisSexuality – illuminating the ways in which the DisHuman child seeks nuanced, politicized and complicating forms of humanity.

‘Some people are not allowed to love’: intimate citizenship in the lives of people labelled with intellectual disabilities

Abstract Disability helps us think differently about the ‘ideal’ neoliberal-able citizen who may not equate to ideas of productive, sexual, ‘normal’. Intimate citizenship – our rights and access to intimacy – is often ignored by those working with people labelled with intellectual disabilities and in research. In this article, we discuss the outcome of a dialogue between self-advocates labelled with intellectual disabilities, academics, service providers, Aboriginal leaders, students and artists about intimate citizenship through love, intimate work and consumption.

‘I never felt like she was just doing it for the money’: Disabled men’s intimate (gendered) realities of purchasing sexual pleasure and intimacy

Scholarly enquiry into the interrelationships of disability and commercial sex remains seriously under-represented within disability and sexuality research. This article, however, draws upon the sexual stories of heterosexual disabled men in order to explore their embodied realities of purchasing of sex, pleasure and intimacy from non-disabled female sex workers. A thematic analysis of these sexual stories revealed multiple and complex motivations for, and experiences of, purchasing of sex, pleasure and intimacy; a purchase ultimately shaped by men’s social and political positioning as disabled and, as with the motivations and experiences of heterosexual non-disabled men, by discourses of hegemonic masculinity and heteronormative sexuality. Given the dearth of research in this area, a number of questions are identified which make important contributions to transdisciplinary knowledges of disabled sexualities, commercial sex work and disabled sexual citizenship.

Reflections on the Process of Researching Disabled People's Sexual Lives

This article offers a reflexive account of the processes, politics, problems, practicalities and pleasures of storying disabled peoples sexual lives for the purposes of sociological research. Drawing upon a doctoral study which explored disabled peoples lived experiences of sex, intimacy and sexuality through their own sexual stories, the author considers how her identity, subjectivity and embodiment – in this case, a white, British, young, heterosexual, disabled, cisgendered woman with congenital and (dependent upon the context) visible impairment – was interwoven within and through the research methodology; most explicitly, as an interlocutor and co-constructor of informants’ sexual stories. Given the paucity of reflexive research in this area, a number of reflexive dilemmas are identified which make important methodological contributions to qualitative sociology, disability studies scholarship and research, and current knowledges of the emotional work of qualitative researchers (Dickinson-Smith et al. 2009).

Pedagogical Possibilities for Unruly Bodies.

ABSTRACT Project Re•Vision uses disability arts to disrupt stereotypical understandings of disability and difference that create barriers to healthcare. In this paper, we examine how digital stories produced through Re•Vision disrupt biopedagogies by working as body-becoming pedagogies to create non-didactic possibilities for living in/with difference. We engage in meaning making about eight stories made by women and trans people living with disabilities and differences, with our interpretations guided by the following considerations: what these stories ‘teach’ about new ways of living with disability; how these stories resist neoliberalism through their production of new possibilities for living; how digital stories wrestle with representing disability in a culture in which disabled bodies are on display or hidden away; how vulnerability and receptivity become ‘conditions of possibility’ for the embodiments represented in digital stories; and how curatorial practice allows disability-identified artists to explore possibilities of ‘looking back’ at ableist gazes.

Critical Disability Studies

This is a chapter concerned with disability politics, interested in the possible offerings of critical psychology and engaged with a project questioning what it means to be a human being. When disability is defined as a problem and when that problem is located in an individual’s body or mind, then there is only really one way we can go with disability and that is pathologisation. We know from our critical psychology colleagues—many of who are represented in this volume of work—that a discipline that individualises human diversity as human trouble will only ever exist as an antithetical community to that of disability activism. The latter, a community in which we locate ourselves, seeks not only to challenge pathologising accounts of disability but also to open up a discussion about the possibilities for human capital offered by disability.

‘Like, pissing yourself is not a particularly attractive quality, let’s be honest’: Learning to contain through youth, adulthood, disability and sexuality:

In this article, the authors (re)conceptualize containment in the context of youth, gender, disability, crip sex/uality and pleasure. The article begins by exploring eugenic histories of containment and traces the ways in which the anomalous embodiment of disabled people remains vigorously policed within current neo-eugenic discourse. Drawing upon data from two corresponding research studies, the authors bring the lived experiences of disabled young people to the fore. They explore their stories of performing, enacting and realizing containment: containing the posited unruliness of the leaky impaired body; containment as a form of (gendered) labour; and containment as a marker of normalization and sexualization, and thus a necessary component for ableist adulthood. Thus, they theorize crip embodiment as permeable, porous and problematic in the context of the impossibly bound compulsory (sexually) able adult body. The authors suggest that the implicit learning of containment is therefore required of disabled young people, particularly women, to counter infantilizing and desexualizing discourse, cross the ‘border zone of youth’ and achieve normative neoliberal adulthood. Crucially, however, the article examines the meaning of what the authors argue are important moments of messiness: the precarious localities of leakage that disrupt containment and thus the ‘reality’ of the ‘able’, ‘adult’ body. The article concludes by considering the ways in which these bodily ways of being contour both material experiences of pleasure and the right(s) to obtain it.

Towards a DisHuman Civil Society

In what ways does a consideration of the politics of dis/ability permit a rethink of community membership, participation and engagement with civil society? What are the implications for the daily lives of dis/abled people, their families and their supporters? How might dis/ability permit us to (re)think political agitation, community identity and everyday activism? Concurrently, we are working with a number of civil society partners who are disrupting normative notions of what civil society means. In this chapter, we start by examining the nature of civil society after it has been touched by the processes associated with neoliberal capitalism. We then start to explore some affirmative and resistant possibilities offered by civil society in these dangerous times. Our search leads us, inevitably, to the politics of dis/ability and the potential of dis/ability to rethink the workings of civil society as a DisHuman project (Goodley D, Runswick-Cole K, Discourse Stud Cult Pol Educ. Online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2014.930021, 2014). We conclude by arguing that any consideration of civil society has to ask questions about the kinds of human beings that are valued at the heart of this civility. Dis/ability is the space through which to rethink the human, the civil and society.