Disability Intimacy in HCI: Defining a Community-Driven Research Agenda

Abstract

Intimacy is a complex, multifaceted subject of importance within disability rights movements. Disabled individuals are entitled to the same universal human rights (e.g., marriage, sexual and reproductive self-determination) as everyone else. Assistive measures that support equity in their personal lives remain central to these movements. However, the research community’s relatively narrow focus of what "intimacy" is (i.e., primarily concerned with sex) combined with factors, such as context, cultural sensitivities, power dynamics and complex ethics, has resulted in its limited exploration in HCI Accessibility Research. Among the relatively small body of HCI literature, most works approach disabled intimacies through a primarily deficit-oriented and heteronormative lens. Notably, ASSETS has featured only two papers on this subject in the past 23 years [53]. Moreover, few studies in HCI explore the methodological and ethical considerations of researching disabled intimacies, and even fewer are disability-led and include queer perspectives [53]. In this half-day virtual workshop, we invite engineers, technology design and development researchers, industry practitioners, accessibility advocates, as well as anyone with disabled and/or queer lived experiences to discuss potential avenues to expand research in Disability Intimacy within HCI. Our goal is to better define what this novel research field could look like, facilitate connections between individuals interested in exploring it, and contribute to its overall visibility and expansion.