The Comparative Sociology Of Disabled Masculinities: A Bourdieusian Analysis Of Autobiographies By Men With Spinal Cord Injuries and Autism Spectrum Conditions

Abstract

Sociological examinations of the intersection between disability and masculinity remain underdeveloped. While insightful analyses have considered the mechanisms through which impairments may interrupt socially valued performances of masculinity, a number of key limitations persist. Extant work within the field has not considered in sufficient depth and complexity: the comparative diversity of the gender/disability intersection; the role(s) of affective embodiment; and the generative interaction between distinct impairment forms and strategic enactments of masculinity. Employing forty published autobiographies from men with Spinal Cord Injuries and Autism Spectrum Conditions, this thesis uses Bourdieusian social theory to conceptualise the dynamic interaction between corporeality and overlapping experiences of privilege/exclusion. Spinal Cord Injuries are conceived of as radically disrupting possessed and anticipated gendered resources, alongside a relative stability of culturally normative, internalised prisms of masculine self-evaluation. Yet, narrators within this group negotiated the encompassing social environment with a knowing, gendered fluidity, through narrative practices of rugged heroism, the privileging of the cerebral, and participation within masculinising interdependencies. Autism Spectrum Conditions were, similarly, conceptualised as involving limited access to valued gendered resources; yet, a phenomenologically disjunctured embodiment of taken-for-granted meaning appeared to interrupt dialectics between internalised and externalised modes of self-evaluation. This group’s “alien” habitus could motivate scholastic forms of learning designed to develop “social skills”, often fostering gendered practices that were recognisably “masculine”, but lacking in interpersonal/cultural fluidity. The thesis concludes with a comparative examination of the two groups under consideration, contending that, alongside significant points of resonance, their experiences were tremendously distinctive in terms of gendered embodiment, temporality, the habitus, social/biomedical interventions, and the “feel for the game”.