Neurological Disability Perspectives on Sexuality through Social Media Platforms

ABSTRACT: As part of the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) Human Sexuality Summer Research Fellowship, the Neurological Disability group collected social media data regarding the intersections of neurological disability and sexuality. For the purpose of the database, neurological disability is determined as self-identified neurological disorders and mental health diseases that can be congenital or acquired, including but not limited to: autism, depression, anxiety, traumatic brain injury, etc. (Wade, 1996). Key terminology for neurological disorders included both a review of literature focusing on biomedicalization of terminology and social justice terminology, as well as a practical review of the efficacy of the search terms through a trial and error method on respective platforms (Jette, 2009; Anastasiou et al., 2014; Andrews et al., 2019). The fellows were mindful of language that reflected medical diagnosis, advocacy language, and layman\u27s terms. Importantly, the structure of the fellowship split the overarching topic of disability into neurological disability and physical disability, using their expertise fellows included or excluded data based on the self-declared identities of the social media user, if a post or comment included the mention of multiple disabilities that crossed both physical and neurological, the data was only collected if the primary conversation was in relation to neurological disability. Data that focused more on physical disability was flagged for colleagues on the physical disability team. Key terms regarding sex/sexuality were brought under the umbrella sexual function and practice, however items regarding sexual identity and partnership were captured. Once terminology was agreed upon, fellows combined one key term from neurological disability with a term from sexuality and modified based on Algospeak inorder to generate data from their respective social media sites, combinations included but were not limited to neurodivergent and sex, ADHD and sex, depression and sex toys. Algospeak, refers to codes or modified words that social media users utilize in order to navigate around safety features on various platforms; fellows were mindful to capture major algospeak guides (i.e. seggs vs sex) in order to effectively find data (Delkic, 2022). The data was organized to capture posts, comments, and key demographic information