We assert that everyday interactions draw from and feed into wider collective negotiations that influence dynamics of power at both the individual and collective level. The model we use in supporting this claim is the notion of storytelling. In interactionist sociology, storytelling has emerged as a key metaphor for understanding the ways in which social life is organised in narrative form. Whereas other narrative approaches have typically focussed on form, symbolic interactionism in contrast explores the embodied and organisational practice of storytelling (Plummer, 1995). As such, it pays specific attention to the contexts and interactions in which stories are told, as well as the specifics of stories themselves, providing ‘analytic purchase on enduring questions about authority, inequality, conflict and change’ (Polletta et al, 2011, p. 111). Stories operate, it is claimed, as ‘social and cultural resources through which people engage in … sense-making’ (Lawler, 2008, p. 32). This notion has been utilised by writers such as Hammack (2008) who draws on symbolic interactionism to describe the way in which personal identities emerge from ‘master narratives’, a process that establishes a link between self and society. How we make sense of ourselves is linked to both the bodies we have and also draws on and recasts stories about bodies like ours that circulate in wider society. For example, work by feminist sociologists such as Skeggs (1997, 2001) and Lawler (2012) have detailed the class politics of taste that are played in embodied practices and readings of people said to be in and out of place.
Different stories abound about the body and how it should function and look. For instance, the emphasis on health and fitness in American popular culture, as evinced in television programmes such as The Biggest Loser, reflects a dominant cultural narrative in which losing weight is considered a path to personal salvation. The prizing of particular standards of health and beauty in such accounts becomes an organising principle around which individuals make sense of their own bodies, lives and identities through the telling of personal stories of diet, exercise and weight gain and loss (Edgely, 2006; Silk et al, 2011). Stories of the athletic body, embedded in accounts of sporting achievement, have also been shown to provide a means for young men to perform their gender by embodying culturally normative views of what it is to be male, even in times of a so-called ‘crisis’ of masculinity (Naess, 2001). In cases where such bodies change due, for instance, to spinal cord injury, stories are drawn on that reframe the once sporting body in ways that call in to question prior gendered self-understandings (Sparkes and Smith, 2002). In each of these cases, powerful narratives about health, gender and body intersect to frame individual's accounts of themselves. Therefore, wider understandings are embedded within the situations within which people come to tell their own stories (Frank, 1995; Plummer, 1995; Hammack, 2011). Stories in this respect are highly normative; they frame the ways in which people make sense of their social worlds and the identities that are available to them within it. They give form to interactions by establishing the roles, plots and settings that individuals act out in their everyday lives (Maines, 1993). The ‘normal’ body is a cultural text transmitted through storytelling that has significant implications for how we approach our own embodiment. Such stories and narratives mean that interactions never begin in isolation – certain forms of interaction and reading are more possible than others and influence how people enact those interactions, including whether to conform to or resist them.
An interest in stories orients us to the intersections between narratives of self and the collective, and to the organisational and cultural contexts in which individuals fashion those narratives, including the scripts and material resources provided within those contexts. It also enables us to address sociological questions of power, asking how particular stories get authorised, and by who, and the implications of that power in shaping how people position themselves within their wider social milieu. Symbolic interactionism does not (necessarily) ignore structures of power; rather we use it in order to understand how the possibilities of constructing and telling stories are played out, as Plummer (1995, p. 27) puts it, in a hierarchical ‘flow of power … both personal power that allows for stories to be told or withheld; and social power which creates spaces or closes down spaces for stories to be voiced’. As such, this way of thinking about and studying stories recognises that power differences exist in society, differences that enable or constrain the extent to which stories can get told, and that because of this people occupy different hierarchical positions in the negotiated order (Maines, 1977).
Nevertheless, many disability theorists, outside of critical disability studies, would see such attempts ‘to present a negotiated social order’, as deflecting ‘attention away from the links between micro-level attitudes and practices and the wider social structure and power relations’ (Barnes and Mercer, 2010, p. 56). However, our approach aims to avoid that problem by stressing the significance of institutions as key story tellers and framers of acceptable and unacceptable bodies (Holstein and Gubrium, 2000). Stories are granted greater validity by the way they are secured through institutional processes and structures that give shape to everyday interactions by, for example, defining which stories are legal, which the state will support via welfare provision, and which will be celebrated as good or moral in culture and creative expression. They are also secured via a cycle of material resource and reward that enable some to dictate the stories that enable and justify inequalities in society. The formal power of material resources, policy, law and institutional structure, as well as the informal power of social mores influence the processes by which people ‘become’ who they are through creating the different positions people take and find themselves in, the roles and identities they may adopt, and shaping people's own internal, including emotional, perception of themselves.
The clearest example we see at the moment of the political significance and danger of institutionalised stories in the United Kingdom relates to the current retrenchment of welfare rights. From the beginning of the current focus on reducing the welfare budget, disabled people have been targeted to lose benefits such as Disability Living Allowance (to become Personal Independence Payment with significant limitations in comparison) and Incapacity Benefit (the Employment and Support Allowance is already being phased in, again with significantly reduced entitlement). These significant changes to the rights available to disabled people are secured in governmental stories, rearticulated in the media and validated in biomedical framings. The institutionalised stories circulating around welfare change place the disabled body at its centre, telling a medicalised narrative of which bodies (the vast majority) are fit for work, how bodies that are not can be made fit for work, and how only through work will such bodies take on value and purpose. Such narratives are not new, any history of welfare change will chart the ways in which particular subjects of welfare are framed as undeserving, drawing on embodied stories that are classed, gendered, racialised and disablist (Fraser and Gordon, 1994, 1997; Lister, 1997). One of the main ways in which disability campaigners are challenging these institutionalised stories is to use social media to circulate their own stories of those refused benefits as ‘counter stories’ to the official rhetoric.
What does an emphasis on such dominant narratives mean for our other argument that the materiality of bodies matter? How do we bring these two parts of the puzzle together? Our argument is that what makes some meanings convincing is both how they correspond with broader social stories and narratives that make interaction possible (having no legs means one is both impaired – given the norm that most people will have legs and a society designed around that norm – and also someone to be seen as tragic or heroic), and the actual body and its potential within that interaction. While language and discourse matters, so does matter itself. It is not incidental which body is read as healthy/unhealthy, able/unable, attractive/ugly. While bodies are not intrinsically any of these things, the establishment of such standards are marked on actual bodies whose shape, movement and emotional connection is changed by them.
What we want to stress is that both impairment and disability are emergent in interaction, rather than an essential aspect of the person. Bodies can be different in numerous ways, and many of those differences will not be significant (Scully, 2008). An important aspect of what makes something a notable difference however is how it manifests itself as a socially salient issue within an interaction. What makes something ‘notable’ is based on the interplay between the embodied, emotive and linguistic dynamics of a specific situation and the broader social narratives, scripts and modes of recognition, which inform how those present come to that interaction, participate in it and produce meaning from it. The meanings attached to difference, as we learn from symbolic interactionism, are not inherent, but are a product of what occurs in social environments and in the company of others. How a society constructs norms of embodiment and responds to people that fall out with those norms raises questions about what it means to live with a different kind of body. The power of coding bodies as ‘other’ to the normal emerges in how certain embodiments are privileged, and the effects of that privileging on how bodies are perceived.
Tales of the ‘normal’ body that exclude impaired embodiments create space for further stories of stigma and ‘otherness,’ while closing down opportunities for stories that appreciate impairment (Shakespeare, 1994). Stories are part of the contexts that create the inequality within the ‘structure of relationality’ (Scully, 2010, p. 33) embedded in interactions between the disabled and the non-disabled that require the disabled to perform in certain ways in order to avoid stigmatisation. The question for Shildrick is what is the political significance of the continued circulation of versions of embodiment that deny the postive possibilities within non-normative forms of embodiment. Her argument, and one we agree with and believe research taking a symbolic interactionist approach can uncover, is that the multiple levels of discrmination disabled people face relate to the ways in which their embodiment fractures the myth of the autonomous, independent self as the ideal. The valarization of this ideal requires the framing of what cannot fit within it as unwanted, unwelcome and unfit, an act that is ‘a violent imposition of epistemic and/or material power’ (Shildrick, 2012, p. 34). Without the imposition of such stories, the division itself between the disabled and non-disabled would not make sense. Deconstructing the powerful imaginery of autonomous self-hood – something which ‘non-normative morphology’ has the potential to do – would make evident the ‘vulnerable nature of all forms of embodied selfhood’ (Shildrick, 2012, p. 37).
Stories require bodies to enact them in order to become real, repeated and understood. This reliance on bodies as well as explaining how stories are secured also points to the weaknesses inherint in their operation. Stories are contestable, and while some stigmatising narratives do achieve a dominant cultural position, that position is by no means guaranteed, new stories can emerge from disabled people themselves (Shakespeare, 1996). Crucially, actual bodies can become sources and objects of challenge in the way people make use of them – creatively and practically – to challenge norms associated with body shape, look, mobility and dexterity, and to offer accounts of disability that are validating. The direct action of some disabled groups which turn wheelchairs into barriers that mean the able bodied cannot go about their business is just one example of this. The growing presence of disability arts is another. Some parrallels may be drawn with sexuality studies. Just as gay and lesbian writers have argued that biomedical processes of labelling contributed to construction of the modern homosexual (Plummer, 1981), so too did the deployment of categories of disability contribute to the making of the disabled person (Blaxter, 1976). And just as we see with the gay rights movement, the emergence of disability activism has sought to wrest definitions of disability away from biomedicine by forming new stories of oppression and discrimination (Oliver, 1990) as well as of value and pride (Morris, 1991; Wendell, 1996). It is these dynamics in which we are interested. The question of power moves from being one of oppressive social structures to the definitional processes that underpin what it means to be disabled. It is our contention that exploring stories of bodily difference is an important means of understanding processes of deligitimation and ways in which they may be challenged.