Accounting for Anger: Narrative Constructions of the Relationship between Brain and Self Following Brain Injury

• In Event: 078 - Section on Sociology of Culture Refereed Roundtable Session
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Abstract

Through study of the narrative response to bodily disruption, sociologists have already learned much about how we negotiate the relationship between body, self, and society when our taken-for-granted understanding of this relationship is challenged by injury, illness or disablement. However, the special case of brain injury offers an opportunity not only to elaborate on this work but also to explore the cultural discourse of brainhood: the idea that we are our brains, that our selfhood resides in this portion of our material body. Taking brain injury followed by disruptive anger as my subject, I analyze narrative accounts of these angry outbursts. Through this analysis, I extract six categories comprising 18 styles or strategies of accounting for disruptive anger following a brain injury. For each strategy, I show how the narrator produces a particular construction of brain-and-self, and hypothesize some consequences of each construction. The results reveal the rich narrative negotiations undertaken by people who find themselves in this deeply interpersonally troubling situation, and they suggest that brainhood may not be as dominant a cultural narrative as has been claimed.

Author

• Jorie Hofstra, State University of New Jersey-Rutgers