Corporeality

Abstract

The purpose of this research report is to describe women's experiences living with rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Twenty women diagnosed with RA participated in semistructured interviews that were analyzed using qualitative content analysis. Findings indicated that how women with RA experience life in their physical bodies is fundamentally important. Corporeality, the name we chose for this phenomenon, is quite literally being one's body. This experience of the reality of being in or being of a body or corpus was central, not only to participants' perceptions of well-being but also to the impact rheumatoid arthritis was having on their lives and the actions they took to contend with the illness. The authors identified three themes that described what corporeality was for women with RA: relating to a noncompliant body, body out of synch, and private body made public. These results are discussed in light of other research about embodied experience in persons living with chronic illness.

Living in the Present

“…This discovery of other ways of "being in the world" can be epiphanic leading to what G. Williams (1984) describes as a process of "narrative reconstruction." This process of re-storying can be empowering and emancipatory, providing alternate understandings of self and the roles assumed in private and public life (Plach et al, 2004). For Dubouloz et al's (2004) re-storying is an example of the type of transformative learning, possible for people experiencing chronic illness.…”

“…Whether feeling removed or separate from her body or consumed by it, each of the women in this research described the centrality of the body within their everyday lives (Ahistrand et al, 2012;Dubouloz et al, 2004;Plach et al, 2004). In RA, the body is the site of pain and disability-it is both object and subject, a biological body and a lived body (Peuravaara, 2013), and it can be experienced as both distant and immediate (Carel, 2007).…”

“…As Shildrick (2007, p. 222) asserts, "Corporeal difference" is not part of the idealized female body, nor is it considered as constitutive of an active sexual subjectivity. Within these interpretations, the disfiguring and disabling effects brought on by RA position women as the "Other" both in terms of femininity and sexual agency (Plach et al, 2004;Shildrick, 2007;S. Williams, 2000).…”

“…Flares also drew attention to the body with the pain experienced as "a form of 'bodily alienation' or 'betrayal'" (S. Williams, 2000, p. 43). For some of the women, the need for adaptations in their everyday lives had led to a new focus on the body, as though recognizing its presence for the first time (Plach et al, 2004). Kelly and Field (1996) identify this awakening of the embodied self as occurring within the context of the noncompliant body, when "the individual becomes acutely aware of the discrepancy between body and self" (p. 249).…”

“…In this vein, contemporary feminist disability activists including Inckle (2014) engage with the notion of "disabled embodiment": "a dynamic, lived position that intersects mind, body, emotion, social, self and other, and operationalises new and challenging forms of representation and articulation" (p. 389). Both corporeality and embodiment speak to the complex realities of many women living with chronic illness such as RA, whose social and emotional well-being alongside their personal and public selves are routinely shaped by the physicality of their condition (Ahistrand et al, 2012;Dubouloz, Laporte, Hall, Ashe, & Smith, 2004;Plach et al, 2004).…”