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.
