Bringing the ‘Capital’ back to ‘Bodily Capital’: Disability and the Ideal Physician Body

• In Event: Disability in Society Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 2. Disability, Health, and Healthcare

Abstract

Medicine is the profession that officially defines, diagnoses, and manages disability—yet disabled professionals represent only 3% of physician practitioners (Meeks et al. 2020). This inequality is not accidental: it points to something foundational about the economic logics that underlie how the medical profession constructs professional identity. I argue that disabled practitioners are not just excluded from medicine through formal meritocratic gatekeeping, but through the construction of an idealized physician body whose cultural formation serves to naturalize the extraction of maximum value from bodies that need no accommodation.

Drawing on and extending the bodily capital literature, I argue that existing scholarship has overwhelmingly treated bodily capital as a personal resource while neglecting the political economy that structures whose bodily capital is valued and for what ends. This paper recovers that economic dimension by bringing disability studies' workplace ableism scholarship into dialogue with bodily capital theory, repositioning ability as a significantly undertheorized axis of professional stratification.

This paper addresses two interrelated questions: first, how do professional socialization texts construct an idealized physician body through implicit messaging while actively disavowing bodily capital requirements as mechanisms of exclusion; and second, what do the experiences of physicians experiencing disability reveal about the economic logics that underlie and sustain those cultural ideals?

Drawing on content analysis of 51 medical school preparation and advice guidebooks and semi-structured interviews with physicians experiencing disability, I find that guidebooks construct the idealized physician body through cumulative implicit messaging that converts bodily demands into ethical obligations, while interview data suggests that disabled physicians internalize and laterally enforce those demands without ever having been told they exist. One participant, pushed out of her residency after accommodation requests were denied, was told explicitly: the denial "came down to a business issue for the program." In medicine, the idealized physician body is not just a cultural preference but an economic one—and its cultural construction serves to conceal the economic logics that depend on it.

Author

• Grace Franklyn, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill