Online Somatic Work: the Case of Sensory Processing Disorder

Abstract

This study examines how people affected by sensory processing disorder (SPD) make their sensory experience visible and meaningful in their unprompted public blog‐writing. I analyzed 66 online narratives written by 44 people affected by SPD. The non‐normative sensory responses of people with SPD are invisible but may result in socially disapproved and challenging behavior (e.g., extreme picky eating). Minimal social and medical recognition of this condition puts people affected by SPD in the position of needing to explain their experience and account for behaviors that are culturally coded as inappropriate. To understand how people affected by SPD communicated their experience to unknown readers, I used techniques associated with grounded theory to analyze their unprompted narratives on The Mighty. Bloggers use several strategies to define SPD for readers, including making use of expert definitions, examples, and comparisons with normative sensory experience, and negative definitions that differentiated SPD from other disorders, normal childhood behavior, and misbehavior. Bloggers used these definitional strategies in conjunction with discourses of normal childhood, good parenting, and biomedicine to communicate and legitimize their experience. Moreover, bloggers did not challenge normative expectations of the human senses but instead reinforced conventional notions about how the senses are supposed to work.