Introduction: Why Bodies Matter

... the normal is a configuration that arises in a particular historical moment. It is part of a notion of progress, of industrialization, and of ideological consolidation of the power of the bourgeoisie. The implications of the hegemony of normalcy are profound and extend into the very heart of cultural production. ... One of the tasks of developing consciousness of disability issues is the attempt, then, to reverse the hegemony of the normal and to constitute alternative ways of thinking about the abnormal

Davis, 2006: 15

This book is about the language of 'ailing' bodies and by extension 'disabilities'. It advocates that we move issues around ill-health and 'abnormal' body functionings away from the incidental space they occupy in the field to one as central as class, gender, ethnicity and sexuality. Specifically, it brings debates about bodies -- and related issues about illnesses, 'normalcy', and 'able-ism' -- into focus by underscoring ways in which our language and texts of body matters construct and are constructed for us by a range of discourses, including societal, biomedical and poststructuralist ones. Drawing on a variety of variously gathered materials, of people and caregivers coping with various kinds of ailments and 'disabilities' (those relating to actual body breakdowns as well as breakdown of language skills), the book pierces the general veil of silence that we have collectively drawn regarding language issues of and around body issues and our reluctance to speak about how some of our most intimate body (dis)functions impact our everyday living and collective sense of 'normalcy'.

Applied sociolinguistics has, over the years, produced scholarship in medical settings and on public health issues (Hall et al., 2006; Higgins & Norton, 2010; Norton & Mutonyi, 2007; Sarangi & Roberts, 1998), and aging-related concerns have been addressed as well (Davis, 2005a; de Bot & Makoni, 2005; Guendouzi & Muller, 2005; Hamilton, 1994, 1999; Ramanathan, 1997) from both institutional and communication-related points of view (cf. Fine, 2006). The present volume contributes to this area while also seeking to break new ground: first, it brings in discourses around bodies per se into the field; this is a realm the field has not adequately addressed. Second, it ushers in discussions about bodies by critically addressing the language by which experiences around bodily breakdowns and ailments occur. This exclusion of the material body may be, in part, both a reflection and result of social constructionism, which has gained recognition in numerous disciplines over the last decade. As Longhurst (2001) points out, while social constructionists have helped subvert the long-standing notion that bodies are simply 'natural' or 'biological', they have, in other ways, tended to render the body incorporeal, fleshless, fluidless, little more than a linguistic territory. The materiality of bodies, from such points of view, becomes reduced to systems of signification.

From the points of view of people with ailments, disabilities and disabling language skills, though, bodies are all about being grounded in the world, so this book's primary concern is with bringing the body back (Williams, 1999) and doing so by addressing relevant language issues. The everyday functioning of persons with a chronic ailment such as epilepsy or type-1 diabetes depends crucially on how they can make their 'malfunctioning' body parts work for them (experimenting with dosages of medications or packaging insulin pumps under their clothes, thus rendering them and their accompanying tubes invisible), so that their conditions appear 'normal'. These conditions get picked up by biomedical and societal discourses in very specific ways that disallow open articulations of how these people linguistically engage with the world through their ailing bodies. In the case of women who have survived breast cancer, another condition that exerts pressure on presenting a 'normal' body, by among other things wearing a prosthesis when they have had mastectomies, are issues of a different sort, those imposed by male-dominated discourses about what an 'attractive' woman's body should look like. A body with only one breast tends immediately to be linguistically categorized as 'unattractive' and 'asexual'. Needless to say, flowing thickly through these issues 'enforcing normalcy' (Davis, 1995), where patients feel compelled to present their bodies in specific ways in public, are societal stratifications relating to ethnicity, race, gender, class and sexuality, with some or a combination of some of these stratifications working to disadvantage people even more (Wilmoth et al., 2008).

Along with addressing issues pertaining to the breakdown of the physical body through particular language use, the volume examines ailments relating to the breakdown of language skills. While people with (type-1) diabetes, epilepsy or breast cancer have had their bodies break down, their general language skills are not rendered problematic as a result of these breakdowns, as in the case of people with Alzheimer's disease or autism, or partial hearing. People writing about their daily engagements with the world when in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease speak about flashes of incoherence in 'coherent' moments, about not being able to tell the front of a dress from the back or about not being able to find one's way home. Those with autism write of being trapped in silence, of the unending frustrations of dealing with the languaged world that does not understand unceasing silence, of never fully being able to engage with the emotional since it is primarily through spoken language that our engagements with other humans happen. Bodies and our everyday negotiations with them, in these cases, assume completely different hues compared to those with chronic ailments or prostheses aspects of one's brain, the material conditions of one's body and the communities one engages with form a different kind of complex nexus.

It is this language of and human voice behind an ailment or 'malfunctioning' body part that is crucial for us in applied sociolinguistics to hear and that is central to this book. Specifically, it is about, among other things, both the language of and accounts (oral and written) produced by and written of such people about their and their loved ones' fluid, volatile bodies whose messy, gaseous, watery, tumorous surfaces seep and leak and evade control (Longhurst, 2001), whose language skills are either breaking down or whose everyday interactions with the world are traumatic because of the individual not being able to use language in particular ways. The body -- flesh...