Abstract
Despite nearly two decades of disability research highlighting the need to take greater account of disabled people's sexualities, sexuality is still largely a taboo subject in disability services, thus limiting service users’ possibilities to express their sexuality. In this article, I aim to show how Swedish personal assistance managers organize sexual facilitation, that is, assistance from personnel in service users’ sexual engagement. The article draws on findings from a focus group study with managers of municipal and private service providers. Three main themes are discussed: the managers’ different ways of organizing sexual facilitation; how they conceptualize sexuality and normality; and risk management practices. I argue that societal discourse on sexual normality greatly influences managers’ views on and strategies for organizing sexual facilitation. Hence, sexual facilitation in personal assistance services is viewed as a non-normative form of sexuality and a work-related risk rather than a possibility to increase service users’ sexual rights.
Highlights
Ever since the publication of the seminal work The Sexual Politics of Disability (Shakespeare, GillespieSells, and Davies 1996) concerning the sexual lives of disabled people, issues around sexuality have been on the disability studies agenda
In disability services as well as in other, similar services, a growing issue of concern for service users is how to engage in sexual activity, often termed as a private matter, when living with around-the-clock services, often a public matter (Browne and Russell 2005; Shuttleworth et al 2010)
The issue can be especially delicate if there is a need for sexual facilitation, that is, assistance from personnel in service users’ sexual activity
Summary
Ever since the publication of the seminal work The Sexual Politics of Disability (Shakespeare, GillespieSells, and Davies 1996) concerning the sexual lives of disabled people, issues around sexuality have been on the disability studies agenda. Sexuality studies have increasingly focused sexual identities and practices as social and political concepts rather than merely biological ones (Weeks 2010). The core of these parallel developments is the challenging of notions of sexual and bodily normality. Few studies have investigated sexuality issues in personal assistance services, for mobility-disabled service users. Since managers are responsible for providing such, it is of value to explore how managers organize personal assistance with regard to different aspects of service users’ sexual lives. The aim of this article is threefold: first, to study how managers of Swedish personal assistance services conceptualize sexual facilitation and what values and norms emerge from their discussions; second, to investigate how they organize sexual facilitation for mobility-disabled service users; and third, to explore possible consequences in practice, for services users and assistants, of the managers’ expressed values as well as of their specific ways of organizing sexual facilitation
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