Conference Program

In the contemporary sociocultural context, marked by the persistence of hegemonic representations depicting people with disabilities, particularly women, in terms of infantilization, desexualisation or victimization, the issue of gender and sexuality education for people with disabilities remains marginalized within both the scientific debate and educational practice. This knowledge gap contributes to forms of epistemic injustice insofar as the recognition of people with disabilities, especially those with complex disabilities, tends to be confined within clinical-healthcare or overtly advocacy-oriented discursive polarities. When assumed as exclusive interpretative frameworks, such polarities may fail to capture the plurality of lived experiences and identity construction processes.
This contribution stems from a scoping review conducted within an ongoing doctoral project in the field of Special Education, aiming to explore the identity construction processes of women with disabilities. Preliminary findings highlight a growing tendency toward the use of participatory and creative research methods, such as Photovoice and Body Mapping as narrative forms.
The analysis of the literature clearly indicates that these methods are increasingly adopted to investigate complex and highly sensitive issues, including bodily, relational, and identity-related dimensions. The researchers’ choice to employ creative methodological approaches, often combined with more traditional data collection tools appears to respond to the need to expand expressive possibilities, enabling communication and self-expression also for those who do not use verbal language or who privilege non-conventional communication modalities. This methodological orientation reflects a renewed attention to research instruments capable of recognizing, from a biopsychosocial perspective, people with disabilities both as active epistemic subjects in the production of knowledge concerning their embodied, relational, and social experiences and as epistemic agents within the specificity of their functioning profiles.
Based on these findings, the paper sets out discuss the emerging methodological perspectives with reference to gender and sexuality education, understood as a democratic practice grounded in the recognition of the plurality of bodies, experiences, and expressive modalities. Creative methodologies, translated into workshop-based activities oriented toward the exploration of bodily imaginaries, social and cultural representations of sexuality, and identity construction processes, are conceived, within this framework, as transformative pedagogical practices, potentially capable of supporting accessible pathways of gender, sexuality, affective, and consent education.