Paper Presentation VII:
The Gendered Body
Sunday, April 11, 10.00–11.30

Elisabet Apelmo
Department of Sociology, Lund University

Gender researcher Susan Wendell maintains that the subordination of disabled people is closely tied to western culture, and its idealisation of the young, strong, controllable body (1997: 260). The disabled body, on the other hand, is conceptualised as passive, dependent and incapable. Disabled people remind of bodily weakness and uncontrollability and are for that reason made the Other, despite most individuals are or will be disabled some time of their life. In disability research in general, gender as a meaning constructing social category has often been overlooked. Thus there is a risk in mainstream disability research to contribute to a disability discourse, which ”produces images of disabled people as asexual, non-gendered beings whose masculinity and femininity are effectively damaged by their being disabled” (Reinikainen 2004: 258). Since women to a greater extent are judged by appearance, they also run the risk of being defined by their disability to a greater extent.

Within sport the idealized view of the body is reinforced. Male sporting bodies are regarded as superior to female, as well as able-bodied are superior to disabled. There is also a hierarchy within the group of disabled athletes, where athletes with acquired impairments are above the one's with congenital impairments, and intellectually disabled athletes are at the bottom.

In this paper I will discuss preliminary results from an ongoing research project on how young women with physical disabilities relate to their own bodies and to the field of sport. The study aims at shifting the issues evolving from the experience of these women from the margins of sport science, gender studies and sociology to its centre. Methodologically, the use of video diaries, in combination with semi-structural interviews and participant observation, aims at expanding these young women’s autonomy vis-à-vis the researcher. With a focus on the intersections of different axes of power and status with special emphasis on gender and disability, I examine the (re)production of normality, possible femininities and the presence /absence of strategies of resistance in a Swedish context.