Embodying disabled liminality: A matter of mal/adjustment to dis/ableism

Abstract

This article combines the line of work that links disability and liminality with feminist dis/ability studies to analyse how the ‘disabled body‐subject’ is produced and subjectified during hospitalisation and post‐hospitalisation. This analysis is based on six bodily itineraries conducted with three men and three women with a spinal cord injury (five with tetraplegia and one with paraplegia) acquired during their adolescence. First, we interpret hospitalisation as a phase of ‘acute liminality’ in which the disabled body‐subject starts being produced as suspicious, expropriated and de/gendered. Secondly, we illustrate how discharge and the ‘return’ to the community entail the formation of several bodily assemblages that embody mal/adjustment. This leaves the subject in a state of ‘sustained liminality’ plagued with paradoxes and ambivalence. We argue that both liminalities lead disabled subjects to do an emotional work consisting of adjusting to situations of affective disablism while also opening up spaces of resistance regarding heterosexist and ableist mandates. We conclude by pointing out the potentialities of a two‐way dialogue between medical sociology and dis/ability studies.

Being just their hands? Personal assistance for disabled people as bodywork

“…Together with disability, gender is especially significant (Bahner, 2013). As García‐Santesmases and Sanmiquel‐Molinero (2022) have shown, disabled people are subject to an ambivalent process of gendering and degendering, especially when they are hospitalised. Our study shows a similar dynamic affecting the PA. Their bodies perform as degendered in body‐tool and body‐prosthesis figurations or as gendered when their bodies are enacted as affecting and affected.…”

Tensions and Escapes in Independent Living Infrastructures for People With Disabilities Under COVID-19

“…In the case of AC, the process has represented a foldback into ways of overprotecting and incapacitating people with learning disabilities that has been driven by infantilization discourses and the adoption of paternalistic attitudes (Björnsdóttir et al, 2015). In the case of CL (which is associated with a benchmark hospital for the treatment of spinal cord injury), these inscriptions have reproduced the procedures of the traditional institution: the “latent function of the hospital is to adjust the disabled body-subject to the fact that both the decision-making and the execution of anything concerning their corporeality are in expert hands” (García-Santesmases & Sanmiquel-Molinero, 2022, p. 391). In both examples, there was a backward move toward the vestiges of the large institutionalizing projects of the 20th century that constrained opportunities for independence and self-determination (Clement & Bigby, 2010).…”

The Rehabilitation Hospital as a “Parenthetical Bubble-Shell”: Adjusting to Disability Within the Covid-19 Crisis

“…Finally, in recent years, several studies have claimed that understanding dis/ableism calls for an intersectional approach (García-Santesmases and Sanmiquel-Molinero, 2022; Goodley, 2017). Elsewhere (Sanmiquel-Molinero, 2023), I have begun to explore how, as Gomersall and Madill (2015) argue, chronotopic disruption appears to be a “gendered phenomenon” (p. 413).…”