Performance and disability: Ways to health reinvention

Abstract

This essay aims to make a dialogue between disability studies in its postmodern aspect, with the Anthropology of Performance from two paths: 1) discussing bodily influence on the meanings attributed to the experience of disability; 2) discussing how performance, with emphasis on sport, places the body in the light of sociability, generating a tension between new body norms and the reproduction of current models on disability and health. We conclude that the performance of people with disabilities can contribute to a review or reinvention of the concept of health from the construction of new identities and empowerment projects. Thus, disability is separated from the biological function/dysfunction and brings it closer to the human being’s action capacity in the world by the sociability established in sport.