A body that matters? The role of embodiment in the recomposition of life after a road traffic accident

Abstract

Drawing on a study of life after road traffic accidents, this article explores the role of the body and embodiment for disability – as well as for ability. It introduces the empirically more open and less medicalized terms ‘decomposition’ and ‘recomposition’ to get around and avoid being appropriated by the medical discourse, while staying true to the body and its role in the shaping of life. Inspired by feminist and social studies of science, technology and medicine, it approaches bodily realities as emerging in practices and as an ongoing open process of mattering and embodying. The argument is that a road traffic accident is better conceived as the starting point of a series of contingent shifts and dynamic recompositions than as a single radical breakdown in people's lives, subjectivities and biographies. People are decomposed and recomposed, disabled and enabled, in shifting and complex ways, in specific practices and relations. © 2009 Nordic Network on Disability Research.