A body that matters? The role of embodiment in the recomposition of life after a road traffic accident

Abstract

Drawing on a study of life after road traffic accidents, this article explores the role of the body and embodiment for disability – as well as for ability. It introduces the empirically more open and less medicalized terms ‘decomposition’ and ‘recomposition’ to get around and avoid being appropriated by the medical discourse, while staying true to the body and its role in the shaping of life. Inspired by feminist and social studies of science, technology and medicine, it approaches bodily realities as emerging in practices and as an ongoing open process of mattering and embodying. The argument is that a road traffic accident is better conceived as the starting point of a series of contingent shifts and dynamic recompositions than as a single radical breakdown in people's lives, subjectivities and biographies. People are decomposed and recomposed, disabled and enabled, in shifting and complex ways, in specific practices and relations.

Keywords:

• body
• embodiment
• subjectivity
• recomposition
• material semiotic
• road traffic accidents

Notes

1. The article builds on a study of life after road traffic accidents conducted in Norway in the period 1996–2003, and is published as Road traffic accidents: The ordering of subjects, bodies and disability (Moser 2003). The approach to sources and methods for collecting data was pluralist. Although interviews were my main source, I also collected a range of other materials, including texts, videos, and photos given to me by interviewees. In addition, I used the interview situation as a site for fieldwork. The data have been disguised to protect confidentiality.

Although I rely upon people injured in traffic accidents and their communication of what becoming disabled implies, the intention is not primarily to give voice to their subjective experiences and stories, or to analyse these (as) narratives. Rather, drawing on post-structuralist resources, and in particular the material semiotic approach, I see these stories and experiences as already configured and shaped, but also contributing to building particular versions of subjectivity, embodiment and disability. It is these specific forms of ordering of reality that I am after. My concerns are thus primarily theoretical and analytical, but still grounded in empirical studies. Accordingly, the stories that are told are selected because they are indicative of particular aspects of the process of recomposition and embodying that I want to explore and have found at work in the data, and not because they are typical of the research subjects and their stories, let alone representative of the ‘population’ of disabled people.

2. The idea that gender, but also disability, is performative, a matter of doing rather than having, is developed in different bodies of work, including ethnomethodological, interactionist and cultural studies traditions (Garfinkel 1967; Goffman 1959/1971; West and Zimmerman 1987 ; Butler 1991 , 1993). The move from performativity to enactment is undertaken in order to avoid the strategic and humanist baggage in a notion such as performance, where it is usually assumed that there is a strategic human subject at the centre of/behind /in control of the action. See Mol (2002) and Moser (2006).

3. I adopt the notion of ‘subjectivity’ in its semiotic and post-structuralist usage, as referring to a location of consciousness, knowing, thinking, or feeling. I use the term ‘subjectivities’ in the plural to emphasize, first, that subject positions are always configured in particular ways, and, second, that a subject position is not something one has, occupies or is structured into, once and for all, but rather a set of differently structured positions one moves between and is moved through, more or less fluidly. Whenever I refer to ‘the subject’ in the singular, this refers to a position that draws together, unifies and hides a more complex set of subjective capacities.

4. This boundary between parts of the body, between the brain and the rest, is familiar. It underlies the dualism between body and mind, and so the ideal of disembodied mind, which is often seen to prefigure how we conceive of bodies as well as subjectivity in ‘modern western culture’. The boundary performed, the devaluation of the body, the idea of disembodied mind, its role for the figure of the ‘modest witness’ on which academic work has become based, and its alternatives, have all been thoroughly discussed and criticized in feminist work. For two different and very influential versions of this, see Jaggar and Bordo (1989) and Haraway (1997) .

5. I have explored the relations and interferences between disability, gender and class elsewhere, in Moser (2006).

6. In line with the material semiotic approach, this notion is intended to capture the collective, yet materially heterogeneous, character of social realities, and so also to avoid the usual a priori distinctions between human and non-human, and nature and society. Similarly, it avoids the equally taken-for-granted distinction between individual and society. In this framework, the individual, including the individual human, and the agency and actions that are usually attributed to him, are all treated as collective enactments or emergencies. See also Callon and Law (1997) and Moreira (2004).

7. For a similar argument on the uses of autobiographies in another context, see Moser and Law (1999). And for an exploration of the enactment of complex cyborg-subjectivities through the use of photos, other images and computer technologies, see Moser (2000). For related explorations of ‘biographical disruption’ in the wake of traumatic illness and impairment see also Thomas (2007) and Seymor (1998).