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Challenging perceptions of disability through performance poetry methods: the ‘Seen but Seldom Heard’ project

HODGES, Caroline E M
FENGE, Lee-Ann
CUTTS, Wendy
2014

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This paper considers performance poetry as a method to explore lived experiences of disability. We discuss how poetic inquiry used within a participatory arts-based research framework can enable young people to collectively question society’s attitudes and actions towards disability. Poetry will be considered as a means to develop a more accessible and effective arena in which young people with direct experience of disability can be empowered to develop new skills that enable them to tell their own stories. Discussion of how this can challenge audiences to critically reflect upon their own perceptions of disability will also be developed.

Recognising the agency of people with dementia

BOYLE, Geraldine
May 2014

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People with dementia have been assumed to possess weak or even no agency, so this paper provides a novel contribution to academic debate by examining their actual potential for agency. The author draws on findings from a qualitative study of everyday decision-making by people with dementia that aimed to iden- tify the role of social factors (such as gender) in influencing their involvement in decisions. Whilst decision-making constitutes a form of deliberative agency, the research also identified when agency was alternatively habituated, embodied or emotional. The Economic and Social Research Council-funded research was undertaken in the North of England. Existing theoretical perspectives on agency are critiqued, particularly in relation to rationality, language and individualised agency. The study highlighted that people with dementia who lack deliberative capacity can nonetheless demonstrate creative capacity for agency. A more expansive concept of agency is needed in social science theory that is informed by the experiences of cognitively disabled people.

Disability and masculinity in South African autosomatography

LIPENGA, Ken J
2014

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This article examines the representation of disability by disabled black South African men as portrayed in two texts from the autosomatography genre, which encompasses first-person narratives of illness and disability. Drawing on extracts from Musa E. Zulu’s The language of me and William Zulu’s Spring will come, the article argues that physical disability affects heteronormative concepts of masculinity by altering the body, which is the primary referent for the construction and performance of hegemonic masculinity. In ableist contexts, the male disabled body may be accorded labels of asexuality. This article therefore reveals how male characters with disabilities reconstruct the male self by both reintegrating themselves within the dominant grid of masculinity and reformulating some of the tenets of hegemonic masculinity.

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