Bodymind Legibility and Possibilities for Qualitative Research

• In Event: Critical Qualitative Research, Disability, and Community: Seeking a Disability Justice Framework for Qualitative Inquiry

Abstract

Bodymind (Price, 2014) differences have been written about across time and place, with a hypervigilance on and even discomfort with difference being persistently part of society. French theorist Henri-Jacques Stiker (1999) argued that disability can be understood as transhistorically disturbing, as it makes visible that “an aberrancy within the corporeal order is an aberrancy is the social order” (p. 40). Disabled people, he argued, are often oriented to as an ontological threat; that is, they “are the tear in our being” (p. 10). Indeed, even the oldest historical documents included descriptions of physical and psychological differences (Braddock & Parish, 2011), with an emphasis on bodies framed as illegible (Butler, 1993). In this paper, we think with Butler’s (1993) writings around of il/legible bodies in an effort to examine the ways in which ableist, normative practices in qualitative research function to privilege and center that which is legible. In doing so, we call for envisioning and pursuing a qualitative research practice that thinks with bodyminds (Price, 2014) rendered unthinkable and unlivable. To do so, we engage with Butler’s (1993) question: “How, then, might one alter the very terms that constitute the "necessary" domain of bodies through rendering unthinkable and unlivable another domain of bodies, those that do not matter in the same way” (p. xi). In considering Butler’s question we turn to Kafer’s (2013) discussion regarding the need for disability to be legibly read on the body—a discussion which has implications for the ways in which qualitative research and researchers have responded to considering disability/disabled participants through accommodation and/or protecting a population deemed “vulnerable.” Thus, with this mandate to “read” disability on the bodymind of a researcher or participant, we become limited, we argue, by the logic of who we imagine as present in the qualitative research community, what is possible in qualitative inquiry, and restricts us to considerations of what “counts” as method. Grounding this argument is our recognition that critical qualitative research communities should include “not just the easily assimilated able-disabled but our brothers and sisters who have the most to lose in becoming visible—those who are completely socially marginalized, stigmatized, and hidden away in institutions…What they know, how they know, and why it matters is most threatening to the status quo” (Sandahl as cited in McRuer & Johnson, 2014, p. 157).


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Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of sex. New York, NY: Routledge.
Kafer, A. (2013). Feminist, queer, crip. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
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Price, M. (2014). The bodymind problem and the possibilities of pain. Hypatia, 30(1), 268-284.
Stiker, H. J. (1999). A history of disability. University of Michigan Press.

Authors

• Emily A. Nusbaum, Mills College

• Jessica Nina Lester, Indiana University