Physiotherapy’s necessity for ableism: reifying normal through difference

Abstract

Although critical disability studies has become more widely recognized within physiotherapy scholarship and education, ableism still profoundly influences and directs the physiotherapy profession. We draw from post-structural French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy to highlight how ableism is bound up in the taken-for-granted assumptions of physiotherapy. We outline how ableism is entangled with the profession’s ontology and European notion of human. As a result, ableism is maintained by clinicians through the embodiment of the ideal species typical human, in both the domain of the mind and body. As it stands, to do physiotherapy necessitates ableism. Imagining physiotherapy otherwise, we set out to critique and unsettle the profession’s metaphysical presuppositions, creating the possibility for new generative avenues for physiotherapy. Deleuze’s ontology of difference provides the profession an alternative starting point which makes the notion of ‘normal’, and consequently ableism, unthinkable.

Points of interest

• This paper explores how physiotherapy’s foundational assumptions continue to uphold ableism.

• By imagining the profession as always in motion, we argue that bodies are understood as always changing.

• We demonstrate how French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy might enable physiotherapy to escape its ableist history.

• By theorizing physiotherapy as always in motion, the possibilities of what clients and clinicians can do and become open up

• We outline the utility of not assessing physiotherapeutic interventions as ‘Good’ or ‘Bad’ but by what they do and what possibilities they open up.

Keywords:

• Ableism
• physiotherapy
• difference
• gilles deleuze
• ontology
• philosophy

Acknowledgements

We would like to express appreciation to Erin Tichenor for her support, contribution, insight, and guidance in creating this work.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.