Did I forget about the body?
I woke up in the spare bed following a rough sleep, feeling restless, stressed, anxious, and tired. The spare bed used to be my sister’s—although she still uses it when visiting—but it is no longer exclusively hers since she now has supported independent living in another home that is funded by Australia’s National Disability Insurance Scheme. Born, or rather interpellated with, what the doctors called ‘brain damage’—a shocking description, unquestionably—my sister moved into an alternative home several years ago, a decision my parents made to ease their lifelong pressures of care and to secure continuity after they are gone. My own bedroom, which was originally the spare bedroom, was unavailable. Even though I have not lived with my parents for many years, they designated a room to me (for some reason) when they built their house several years ago. Since Grandma died, though, this has become ‘Pop’s room’—he moved in with my parents after her death around five years ago.
I was feeling stressed, anxious, and tired for several reasons. First, I was visiting the family home because my dad was recently diagnosed, or, again, interpellated, with dementia. This inevitably creates a range of pressures and uncertainties. Second, I have had anxiety for several years, and it manifests in different ways, particularly when I am in different environments. Sometimes I become reclusive. Sometimes I become unproductive. Sometimes I become paranoid and catastrophise. Lately, unfortunately, I have had panic attacks. Anxiety produces a range of physiological ‘fight or flight’ responses, and sometimes this sets off another condition of mine: atrial fibrillation. I try to keep this at bay by managing my stress and anxiety and by taking medication, but sometimes it is as if my heart and its beat have a mind of their own, flopping around like a fish, and impacting my ability to work, concentrate, and do things that I might otherwise like to do. Third and finally, as I tossed and turned in bed with many of these hitherto thoughts animating my mind, I saw an email on my phone with the subject line reading: ‘Strictly confidential: opportunity to respond’.
The email in question referred to a forthcoming, and now since published, article in this journal, which was itself a response to a previous article of mine, ‘Screwing the Social Model of Disability’ (Thorneycroft 2024), also published in this journal. In my article, I revisited the sex-gender distinction that is analogically used to support the impairment-disability distinction within the British (or strong) social model of disability, and noting the (increasing) untenability of the former, I explored how this must then impact several presuppositions and assumptions with the latter. Following Butler’s (1990) provocative claim that sex is gender, I correspondingly argued that impairment is disability. I suggested that we ‘screw’ (or twist) some of the terms and foci of the social model, use disability and impairment synonymously, focus our efforts to the task of ableism and disablism, and finally, move beyond identity politics to focus on ‘what to do’ rather than ‘who we are’ (Thorneycroft 2024).
Anxious, I skimmed through several pages of their text. It appears they agree with the issue I identified but disagree on the solution I proposed. Moreover, they suggest my ‘formulation appears to leave the actual, lived body-mind nowhere in sight’ (Watermeyer and Harvey 2025, 566), and I thus contribute (inadvertently, I gather) to ‘compounding … the elision of the lived reality of impairment in the lives of disabled people’ (566). I lay there thinking. Had I really ignored or forgotten about the body? Could I even do that, especially given each of the materialities—disability, death, degeneration, stress, anxiety, debilitation, illness—enveloping my life and the people around me? I thought I recognised the materiality of the body. Quoting Butler (1993, xi), did I not say: ‘bodies live and die; eat and sleep; feel pain, pleasure; endure illness and violence; and these “facts”, one might skeptically proclaim, cannot be dismissed as mere construction’? This quote from Butler (1993) is introduced in the preface to Bodies That Matter, where they are reflecting upon the reception to Gender Trouble (1990) and specifically the argument regarding sex’s construction. Reflecting upon the reaction to the supposedly preposterous argument that sexed (and I argue, impaired) bodies are constructed, Butler (1993, x) muses, ‘[c]ouldn’t someone simply take me aside’ to teach them the facts of life?
In the conclusion, I noted that I did not want to ‘throw … the proverbial baby out with the bathwater’ (Thorneycroft 2024, 297), but maybe I had, even a literal body, perhaps? Couldn’t someone simply take me aside?
It is impossible to fully address everything in Watermeyer and Harvey’s (2025) article, and to clarify, there are many parts I agree with and very much like. I do think, though, there is a central tension between my own contribution and the authors. In their response to my article, they are critiquing the linguistic or discursive turn within feminist (and) disability studies that, they and others argue, allegedly ignores, doubts, and/or erases materiality (Vehmas and Mäkelä 2008). In other words, in my discursive turn, I suffer from what some have called ‘somatophobia’: fear and/or hostility of the body (Spelman 1988). Allegedly, a turn to things like construction, performativity, and discourse contributes to a ‘vanishing’ or ‘disappearing’ body (Watermeyer and Harvey 2025; Hughes and Paterson 1997). The introduction to this short article is intended to illustrate my anti-somatophobia. Additionally, I contend that this tension rests on different discourses and meanings circulating construction, performativity, and discourse, and it is these terms that I seek to further clarify in this article. Whereas critical realism or phenomenology may seek to centre the body, my alternative exposition was not to make the body vanish or disappear but to rather show how the body appears at all.
Discourse, Construction, Performativity
Several claims by Watermeyer and Harvey (2025) tread similar ground to criticisms made against post-structuralist disability studies. For example, Shakespeare (2013, 5, 52) suggests that post-structuralist writers ‘emphasise the role of discourse rather more than the impact of material forces’, or that they ‘generally seem much more interested in texts and discourses then the ordinary lives of disabled people’. Discourse, though, incorporates more than language; discourse refers to ‘practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak’ (Foucault 1972, 54), which means that discourse refers both to language and social practice(s) as it captures meanings, statements, and representations that ‘congeal’ to create particular forms of ‘reality’. Feely (2016) freely accepts that many post-structuralists may foreground discourse over materiality but argues that this does not mean they think ‘there is no world, outside of language’ (Shakespeare 2013, 54). Rather, the emphasis is placed on rejecting essentialist ontologies and moving from an individual body to the social practices through which impaired/disabled bodies are constituted (Goodley 2014; Feely 2016; Shildrick 2012).
While Barnes (2012, 23) argues that post-structuralist accounts ‘downplay the material reality of disabled people’s lives’, post-structuralists suggest it is only through discourse that materiality can be apprehended or comprehended. For Butler (1993), the supposedly ‘natural’ body is rather a ‘naturalized effect’ of discourse. Referring to the ‘indissolubility of materiality and signification’ (Butler 1993, 30), Butler argues:
every effort to refer to materiality takes place through a signifying process which, in its phenomenality, is always already material. In this sense, then, language and materiality are not opposed, for language both is and refers to that which is material, and what is material never fully escapes from the process by which it is signified. (68)
This passage indexes an intervention that clarifies that ‘linguistic constructivism’ does not transform the body into nothing other than a linguistic effect. Constructivism does not equal linguistic monism, as language and materiality condition one another. The point is not that ‘impairment [and/or disability] does not exist’ (Shakespeare 2013, 66) but rather that the body and its materiality occur through discursive practices that are likewise inevitably material (Goodley and Runswick-Cole 2013; Hickey-Moody 2009; Tremain 2001).
Constructivism is untenable (and often confusing) for (critical) realists (Shakespeare 2013; Vehmas and Mäkelä 2009), but this rests on a misunderstanding: ‘our customary notions of “construction” seem to get in the way of understanding such a claim’, which may invite ‘[t]hinking the body as constructed demands a rethinking of the meaning of construction itself’ (Butler 1993, xi). For Butler (1993, 8), the ‘point has never been that “everything is discursively constructed”’. Rather, the focus should be on deconstruction; the ways that subjects are excluded, erased, violently foreclosed, and abjected (Butler 1993), which have relevance in the contexts of ableism/disablism and subjectification and unintelligibility of impaired/disabled bodyminds (Feely 2016; Hughes 2009; Thorneycroft 2024; Shildrick 2012). After all, ‘not all of us can say, with any degree of certainty, that we have always been human’ (Braidotti 2013, 1), and many impaired/disabled bodyminds have not been considered fully human (Hughes 2009; Thorneycroft 2020). A central feature of post-structuralist disability studies is considering the conditions in which subjects become conceptually and hierarchically split and ranked (Feely 2016; Galvin 2003). Butler (1993, 6) notes a common retort to constructivism, ‘then who is constructing the subject?’, but construction is ‘neither a single act nor a causal process initiated by a subject and culminating in a set of fixed effects’ (Butler 1993, 10). Construction is ‘neither a subject nor its act, but a process of reiteration by which both “subjects” and “acts” come to appear at all’. Central to this is performativity.
Critical realists and others have suggested that the discursive turn has meant neglecting the materiality of the body (or the body’s ‘matter’), but for many scholars couched in the latter camp, ‘matter is already materialised’ and the body is a ‘set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being’ (Butler 1993, 9, 33). Bodies are not simply described but constituted in the act(s) of description: ‘there is no reference to a pure body which is not at the same time a further formation of that body … the constative is always to some degree performative’ (Butler 1993, 10–11). Insisting that there is no doer behind the deed—because norms precede us and constitute us—highlights the discursive practices through which impaired/disabled embodiment is constituted, which in itself exposes the political dimensions attached to subjectification, and the possibility that alternative embodiments and subjectivities are just as possible (Goodley and Runswick-Cole 2013; Shildrick 2012). In other words, because performativity is constitutive, that there ‘is an “outside” to what is constructed by discourse’, and that some bodies disrupt intelligible discursive protocols (Butler 1993, 8), may enable a queering of norms that help re-write impaired/disabled (and other abject) bodies otherwise.
Conclusion: Matter and Meaning for Disability Studies
This brief response has tried to clarify several terms (construction, discourse, and performativity) that explain the construction of (disabled) embodiment that lay at the heart of my previous work (Thorneycroft 2024). Far from seeking to erase the body, I tried to show how the body comes into the picture at all. I noted in the original article that these debates rest on ‘opposing ideological-theoretical positions between realist-relativist onto-epistemologies’ (Thorneycroft 2024, 290). Worried that the discursive/linguistic turn made the body vanish or disappear, corporeal scholarship (and later, new materialism) sought to refute or rebalance the conversation by turning to phenomenology or (critical) realism to help ‘reclaim’ the material body. Post-structuralist scholars, in turn, worry that engagements with phenomenology or corporeality reinscribe or re-naturalise impairment’s ontology and cede too much ground to medicine (and, in turn, pathology). These ebbs and flows in our discipline’s discourse speak to the power of performativity: that discourse has the power to bring into effect what it names.
Perhaps ironically, it may be that Watermeyer and Harvey’s (2025) critique of my text may be performative in ways that some may think impairment and/or disability is not. Performativity is not a singular act but rather a set of repeated acts, and this helps determine the matter and materiality of bodies in the world and the discourses animating the world (Butler 1993). I welcome Watermeyer and Harvey’s (2025) critique because it adds important debate that enlivens the field. Shildrick (2012, 31) suggests the work of critique is to ‘keep alive the very process in which questioning itself generates new potential’. Critique, though, is often difficult because as readers, ‘texts do not reflect the entirety of their authors or their worlds’ (Butler 1993, 19). Debates within feminist (and) disability studies have also too often been structured around realist-relativist debates. When one submits that impairment is discursively constructed, another responds by insisting on the ‘reality’ of impairment. Critique in the field requires frameworks that nourish multiplicity rather than false binaries or mutual exclusivities.
To say that the body is discursively constructed is not to say that my grandma never died. To speak of my sister’s ‘brain damage’ is not to say that she does not face substantial material challenges in the world. It is not as if my father will be able to ‘rescue’ himself from dementia’s grips by simply reimagining the terms of un/intelligibility central to his subject position. The point, rather, has been to explore the conditions in which bodies come into being and meaning and to think deconstructively for those unintelligible, abject bodies. Further, I did not ‘simply choose one—disability—and erase the other [impairment]’ (Watermeyer and Harvey 2025, 573), because I argued that ‘impairment was always already disability’ (Thorneycroft 2024, 286). To insist on the discursive construction of bodies is not to discount their materialities; rather, it is to explore the normative conditions that frame and form particular bodies as some that matter, and some that do not. The challenge is to find sites and possibilities for which these norms can exist otherwise. I remain persuaded by the idea that asking how the body appears, rather than assuming its ‘givenness’ or ‘naturalness’, is a deeply material matter of enquiry.
Competing Interests
The author has no competing interests to declare.