Post-Tenure Life, Entry 4 - Taking More Intellectual Risks: The Projects I’m Working on Now

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One special gift of tenure? The freedom to explore new topics.

After years of dressing up radical ideas in slightly more fundable and publishable language, I finally feel like I can do more projects that thrill and unsettle me—projects that might’ve once earned a raised eyebrow.

So here’s a glimpse of the intellectual experiments I’m diving into now:

1. Artificial Intelligence, Disability, and Sexuality

The more AI creeps into our intimate lives, the more I find myself circling back to one pressing question: Whose desires are being represented? How are they being represented? How is AI re-shaping our sexual lives? I am, of course, interested in how disability influences these discussions.

Across several projects, I’ve been unpacking how AI technologies are shaping (and often distorting) the presence of disabled people in digital sexual landscapes. In one recently published paper, I analyzed AI image generators and their depictions of disability and sexuality.

In a second project, I’ve been exploring AI-generated dating bios. These tools tend to erase disability altogether or cast it as a deficit overcome through optimism and resilience.

Similarly, I’ve been researching synthetic influencers on platforms like OnlyFans, including AI-generated models with Down syndrome created by non-disabled developers. What does it mean to digitally simulate disability for profit while real disabled sex workers face structural exclusion and algorithmic suppression?

But it’s not all critique. I’m also asking: What could AI make possible?

I’ve started exploring how AI tools might be used to crip sex education—especially for folks who’ve been excluded from formal sexual health curricula. Could we design AI-powered resources that are adaptive to different access needs, that model consent in nuanced ways, or that let people explore intimacy and pleasure at their own pace, without shame or surveillance? Could these tools affirm diverse bodyminds and sexualities instead of reinforcing hierarchies?

2. Disabled OnlyFans Creators and Talent Managers

OnlyFans is sometimes framed as a space of empowerment for marginalized creators—including disabled people. But as with most things related to sex, labor, and disability, the story is more complicated.

In a recently published paper, I explored how OnlyFans content creation can be both empowering and disempowering for disabled people, depending on intersecting factors like platform policies, access to support, algorithmic visibility, and audience expectations. Drawing from news media and Reddit threads, we traced how some disabled creators find community, agency, and financial autonomy through the platform—while others face heightened exploitation, platform bias, or emotional and physical burnout.

That paper was just the beginning. We’re now conducting interviews with disabled content creators to dig deeper into their lived experiences: How do they navigate audience entitlement, fetishization, or invisibility? What kinds of relationships do they have with the managers, friends, or collaborators who help produce or promote their content?

I’m particularly interested in the behind-the-scenes labor—the folks supporting disabled creators in managing content, navigating tech, and maintaining boundaries. Who holds power in these relationships? Who gets to call the shots when sexuality becomes both work and care?

This isn’t a simple story of empowerment or exploitation. It’s complex and political—and it deserves greater attention.

3. Toward a Crip Sociology of Fucking

This one’s been simmering for a while. It’s the most personal, the most radical, and maybe the most joyful.

I’ve been writing papers that propose a “crip sociology of fucking”—not as a metaphor, not sanitized or desexualized, but fucking in its raw, awkward, tender, messy forms. It’s part theory, part declaration, part love letter to the disabled folks who refuse to be desexualized or pitied.

I’m asking: What happens when we center disabled people’s erotic lives—not as problems to fix, but as sites of knowledge, creativity, resistance, and care? What might sexual agency look like outside of productivity, performance, and ableist scripts of desirability?

These papers are grounded in crip theory, intersectionality, and conversations I’ve had with dozens of disabled folks about pleasure, kink, boredom, masturbation, and intimacy. It’s a rejection of the idea that sexuality must be goal-oriented and follow non-disabled standards.

The Future

What unites these projects is that they feel risky—not just because they tackle taboo topics, but because they push me to ask better, braver questions. Not “what’s publishable?” but “what needs to be said?”

Tenure didn’t make me fearless. But it gave me a little more room to move.

And I plan to make the most of it.

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