Troubling narratives about dis/ability and the social encounter through conversations between narrative inquiry, critical disability studies, and geographies of disability

Abstract

This article explores written narratives produced by two ‘abled’ people about a social encounter, or event, with a ‘disabled’ person in an inland Chinese city. To interpret these, I draw upon principles and approaches associated with narrative inquiry, critical disability studies and geographies of disability. I identify the structural elements, sequentiality, and themes (e.g. fear, pity and especially anxiety, or perplexity) permeating these narratives as well as their lack of resolution, or closure. Later, I situate these narratives within wider discursive contexts albeit while emphasising how perplexity emerges through a lack of identity, or rupture, between words and the world. These troubling and perplexing narratives register the fragility of symbolic systems and the troubled subject positions these enable/disable. Nevertheless, and crucially, these narratives also trouble the taken-for-grantedness of ostensibly stable abled/disabled categories, persons, and objects, in ways which may permit realisation of things outside reductive hierarchical binaries.