A Critical Review of Sexuality, Technology and Disability

Despite the call to action in Mankoff’s foundational paper in 2010, arguing for the active participation of disabled people in research about them [91], the need for inclusivity persists, echoing the same imperative as it did more than ten years ago [164]. We are still seeing technology for disabled people being produced without their active participation, resulting in representations of disabled people’s non-normative needs as medicalised or interventional [140, 141, 145].

HCI research in the area of sexual health, menstruation, reproductive health, sexuality, and intimacy [29, 51, 104, 126, 136, 163] engages with both medical and social considerations, and is increasingly incorporating feminist and intersectional approaches [13]. While there have been recent efforts to de-medicalise sex and sexuality research in HCI, [33, 112, 151], it is unclear whether this effort extends to the overlap of sexuality and disability (especially given that research on sex and disability in general continues to be largely medicalised [119]). Moreover, disabled individuals have historically been portrayed as desexualised, and asexual [130, 143], and the continuation of gaps in HCI research regarding disability risks further reinforcing these harmful narratives.

Approaches to explore technology and sexuality in HCI have included studies on sexual health and/or wellbeing [43, 73], design practices and values around embodiment, pleasure, intimacy and desire [11, 75, 151, 161], users re-purposing online networks to create intimate and sexually charged niches [12, 111], or intimate user-artifact relations [144]. Subsumed under the term ‘technosexuality’, a subset of these studies not only examines how technologies facilitate sexual interactions, pleasures, and fantasies, but also acknowledges the transformative capacity of sex-technologies and their potential to generate novel practices, sexualities, and desires [14, 74, 156]. However, HCI research on technology and sexuality remains scarce, especially as it is laden with prejudice, controversy, and taboo [74]. While in recent years scholars have increasingly drawn attention to the sexualities of the excluded (e.g., older people [76, 127] or sex workers [17]), sexualities of marginalised groups remain largely understudied – including the ethical ramifications thereof [72].

We propose that limiting our research to focus on disability when exploring impairments or accessibility is not true inclusive design. Only exploring sexual wellbeing and disability in the context of health leads to the focus on clinical and medical needs and risks omitting experiences of pleasure, intimacy, and identity. Focusing on technology as a solution to be developed and evaluated without active participation of disabled people can lead to disability dongles [89], which are agnostic of need.

By exploring the literature on disability and sexuality within the HCI field, we can take stock and critically analyse how the field is currently engaging with these three intersectional domains. We aim to contribute an understanding of how the field can harness accessible technology that is sensitive to the diverse needs and experiences of disabled individuals. This approach aligns with the broader goals of promoting inclusivity, diversity, and equity in technology design and application.

We present a descriptive and analytical outline of existing research on disability, sexuality, and HCI, highlighting gaps in our collective knowledge to guide future research.

Our work draws on different theoretical lenses for analysis and builds on existing prior work positioned at the intersection of disability studies and crip theory, queer theory, and sexuality studies. In the following we present the concepts and discourses that have shaped and motivated this critical review. Firstly, we present different disability models and where we position ourselves (section 2.1). Secondly, we introduce the five circles of sexuality as one of our analytic lenses, and outline how disabled intimacies and sexualities have been represented in related literature (section 2.2). Lastly, we conclude this section with an alternative to dominant understandings of disability and sexuality by discussing how disabled sexualities relate to queerness (section 2.3).