Inhabiting different bodies over time: narrative and pedagogical challenges

Abstract

Over the life course our ‘real’ bodies change and we come to inhabit them and know them and ourselves in different ways. Of course, just how we learn to inhabit different bodies in the flesh and give meaning to them over time is a complex relational process that has consequences for our being in the world. Central to this process is the role of narrative. Culture provides people with a menu of narrative forms and content from which they selectively draw in an effort to line up their lived experience with the kinds of stories available to organize and express it to themselves and others. This narrative menu operates as a key resource in linking the sensorial materiality of the body to wider social structures that shape the meaning making process at the individual and group level. As such, narrative resources can be both enabling and constraining when the individual confronts bodily change. In this article, we explore the ways in which narratives as an embodied act infuse the flesh and help give meaning to dramatic bodily change for a small group of amateur sportsmen who have suffered catastrophic spinal cord injuries and become disabled through playing the sport of rugby football union. We close by offering some reflections on the dilemmas that bodily change instigates for those who operate with limited narrative resources and the pedagogical challenges this provides for those involved with them.

Keywords:

• Bodies
• Identities
• Spinal cord injury
• Narrative
• Pedagogy

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their insightful and constructive comments on an earlier draft of this article.