Childhood Disability, Identity and the Body

One of the contributions of the new social studies of childhood developed in the 1980s and 1990s was the understanding of childhood as a social and cultural construction. James et al. (1998) have pointed out that this made social constructionism the major theoretical foundation for redefining childhood as opposed to the naturalistic orthodoxies and biological determinism that often dominated previous approaches. Under this perspective the child appears as an effect of social relations, leaving little room for the child’s body as a physical or corporeal entity. In this chapter we argue for the importance of material bodies as an aspect of children’s lives, which also shapes social relations as much as it is shaped by them. Children’s social participation is most often embodied actions performed by real living corporeal persons. In recent years childhood scholars have directed increased attention to children’s bodies (Colls & Hörschelmann, 2009; Hörschelmann & Colls, 2010; Prout, 2000). We believe that attention to children’s embodied existence is particularly important when exploring the lives of disabled children.