Persone con disabilità, sex appeal e relazioni sentimentali nelle serie-tv: il caso “Special”

The cinematographic and television narrative of disability rarely incorporates sexuality, representing disabled people often “a-sexual” or unattractive, generally male and heterosexual. Recently, instead, we are witnessing a greater protagonism of the stories of disabled people, even with LGBT sexual orientation. The tv serie Special, a short form comedy on the life of a young adult gay suffering from cerebral palsy divided into 8 episodes and broadcast for the first time on the Netflix platform in 2019, potentially represents an innovative product capable of emphasizing the different components, including success, of sex appeal of the protagonist. Starting from the erotic capital’s theory of Catherine Hakim (2010), through the qualitative analysis of the content, the present essay proposes to analyze which elements of erotic capital are most emphasized in the series, and to highlight elements of discontinuity with respect to other television products analyzed in previous research.