Disability Intimacy in HCI: Defining a Community-Driven Research Agenda
Ekat Osipova, Jay Rodolitz, Kirk Andrew Crawford, Kay Kender, Ana O. Henriques, Chorong Park, Patricia Piedade, Rachel E Wood, Katta Spiel · 2025 · ASSETS 2025: 27th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility · doi:10.1145/3663547.3748640
Summary
This workshop paper proposes a half-day virtual workshop at ASSETS 2025 to define a community-driven research agenda for "Disability Intimacy in HCI" — a field the authors argue has been vastly underexplored in accessibility research. The organizers, a team of nine researchers from institutions across Austria, the US, and Portugal (many with disabled and/or queer lived experience), note that ASSETS has featured only two papers on disability and intimacy in its 23-year history, and that the broader HCI literature on the topic tends to adopt a deficit-oriented, heteronormative, and medicalized lens. They argue that intimacy extends far beyond sexuality to encompass emotional well-being, support networks, meaningful relationships, interpersonal trust, communication, family planning, conflict navigation, and connection with oneself and others. The workshop is grounded in crip theory and queer theory as complementary critical frameworks for challenging normative assumptions about disabled bodies, sexuality, and intimacy. Drawing on Hamraie and Fritsch's "Crip Technoscience Manifesto," the organizers advocate for research approaches that are anti-assimilatory, anti-normative, and opposed to techno-solutionism — while embracing joy, pleasure, and the expansive potential of crip intimacies.
Key findings
The paper identifies persistent patterns in existing HCI research on disability and intimacy: (1) contextualizing disability within a medical model where sexuality issues are portrayed as caused by disability; (2) presenting intimate technologies primarily as tools to fix problems while ignoring societal context; and (3) prioritizing mechanistic, heteronormative understandings of sexuality. A literature review found that from 2001 to 2024, only two papers at ASSETS addressed disability and sexuality using an asset-based lens. Notable exceptions in broader HCI include Crawford et al.'s work on LGBTQIA+ disabled and neurodivergent communication in intimate relationships, and research grounded in pleasure activism that frames masturbation as a site of joy rather than a problem to solve. The workshop is structured as a 4-hour virtual event with both synchronous and asynchronous components, including: a "Crip Pleasures A-Z" icebreaker game, collaborative Venn diagram activities to collectively define disability intimacy, a knowledge sharing session on accepted submissions, breakout discussions on specific research challenges (ethics, consent, participant care, taboo, risks, community-centered design), a "Futuring Disability Intimacy Showcase" of participant-created artifacts, and collaborative drafting of a "Disability Intimacy in HCI" manifesto. The workshop accepts diverse submission formats (A4 pages with any content, or 3-minute audio/video) and explicitly welcomes anonymous submissions and listener-only participation.
Relevance
This workshop challenges the accessibility research community to confront a significant blind spot: the near-total absence of research on how technology mediates, supports, or constrains the intimate lives of disabled people. For accessibility practitioners, the implications are both philosophical and practical. The critique of deficit-oriented approaches — where disabled people's intimate needs are framed as problems to be solved rather than aspects of human experience to be supported — applies broadly to how we design assistive technologies. The workshop's embrace of crip and queer theoretical frameworks offers alternative lenses for accessibility research that center joy, pleasure, autonomy, and self-determination rather than functional rehabilitation. The emphasis on community-driven, disability-led research methodology provides a model for how sensitive topics can be explored ethically while centering the voices and expertise of disabled people. The practical workshop design — with its attention to accessible participation, anonymous engagement options, flexible synchronous/asynchronous formats, and explicit community agreements — also serves as a template for inclusive research events. The planned manifesto output could shape future research directions in this emerging field.
Tags: disability intimacy · crip theory · queer theory · sexuality · disability rights · community-driven research · workshop · disability justice · intersectionality
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