Missing Phenomenological Accounts: Disability Theory, Body Integrity Identity Disorder, and Being an Amputee

Abstract

Phenomenology provides a method for disability theorists to describe embodied subjectivity lacking within the social model of disability. Within the literature on body integrity identity disorder (BIID), dominant narratives of disability are influential, individual bodies are considered in isolation, and experiences of disabled people are omitted. Research on BIID tends to incorporate an individualist ontology. In this article, I argue that Merleau-Ponty's conceptualization of “being in the world,” which recognizes subjectivity as embodied and intersubjective, provides a better starting point for research describing the experiences of those with BIID and amputees.

The Import of Critical Phenomenology for Theorizing Disability

“…(2017, 196) 13 For Guenther, "[t]he main difference between classical and critical phenomenology turns on a methodological and ethical commitment to attend to the ways that power and history shape lived experience" (2021,6). In addition to contextualizing structures of experience to examine how power functions within our lives in rela-11 See Abrams 2014; Aho and Aho 2008;Carel 2016;Carel 2022;Fisher 2014;Hall 2021;Hughes and Patterson 1997;Lajoie 2019;Lajoie and Douglas 2020;Reynolds 2018;Salamon 2012;Scully 2008;Toombs 1988;Toombs 1992;Valentine 2020;Weiss 2015;Wendell 1996;Wieseler 2012;Wieseler 2018;Wieseler 2019;Wieseler 2022. 12 Guenther also takes this position, claiming that Beauvoir, Fanon, and Sartre articulate "critical phenomenologies of patriarchy, racism, colonialism, and capitalism" (2021, 12).…”

“…Elsewhere, I suggested thinking of impairment as equivalent to the phenomenological notion of the objective body-the body as it can be perceived, measured, and described in biophysical terms (Wieseler, 2018). I have since come to think of the concept of impairment as one of many ways of organizing our thinking about characteristics of bodyminds.…”

“…Phenomenologists have had a longstanding interest in disability 22 as metaphor, case study, thought experiment, and contrast case for clarifying normal or, more precisely, as I will discuss below, normate experience (Reynolds 2018;Wieseler 2018). That is to say, many phenomenological accounts seem to center disability but are nonetheless problematic insofar as they portray disability as bodymind limitation and fail to include disabled people's perspectives on their lived experiences.…”

A Crip Queer Dialogue on Sickness (Editors' Introduction)

“…4 While there exists much excellent work on gendered conceptions of health and ability, considerations of race, class, size, sexuality, and nationality are only rarely and cursorily addressed. Indeed, on closer inspection, and as others have pointed out, social positionality and lived realities of privilege and oppression are often bracketed out of phenomenological analyses of illness and disability (Wieseler 2017(Wieseler , 2018. To our knowledge, there has been no collection of work, special issue or philosophical volume dedicated to phenomenological examinations of illness, madness, and disability which centers issues of oppression, power, and privilege beyond the category of gender.…”