A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of - Etheses - Queen Margaret ...

Chapter 7: Disability in Everyday Life
Introduction
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Power is a thing of the senses... it lives as a capacity, or a yearning, or a festering
resentment... it can begin as a secret kept or as a gesture glimpsed in a hallway
(Stewart, 2007:84).
Kathleen Stewart describes ways in which ideology is materialised through what she terms
„the politics of ordinary affect‟. While structures grow entrenched and identities take place
within ways of knowing that have become habitual, she argues that ordinary affects give
things the quality of a „something to inhabit and animate‟ (Stewart, 2007:15). In this way:
There‟s a politics to being/feeling connected (or not), to impacts that are shared (or
not)... to all the forms of attunement and attachment. There‟s a politics to ways of
watching and waiting for something to happen and to forms of agency... There‟s a
politics to difference in itself... the difference of habit and dull routine, the difference
of everything that matters (Stewart, 2007:16).
In my final chapter I describe and analyse a number of moments experienced by the
participants in my research as they have been occupied in getting on with the business of
everyday life: preparing an evening meal, going to a restaurant, looking for a pair of shoes to
buy in Marks and Spencer, for example. While such moments may be ordinarily overlooked
and regarded as insignificant, I argue that each is full of meaning. With Brett Farmer, I
would suggest that „it is precisely through the mundane and seemingly trivial practices of
everyday life that ideology works most freely and effectively‟ (Farmer, 2003:22).
Susan Willis observes that „almost everything we do in daily life, we do as individuals‟
(Willis, 1991:175), and it is as individuals that the politics of ordinary effect are experienced:
where the words are heard and behaviours encountered which fix impaired individuals in the
disabled role and remind them of the expectations implicit in that role. The majority of these
observations were made with research participants as individuals: watching TV; crossing
Birmingham New Street Railway Station; visiting an online chat room. Three participants
asked if they could involve partners or friends as co-participants. Two participants I
observed engaging interactively in work activities. I talked with each participant before and
after each observation, usually by themselves but when asked I let other people join the
conversations.
Joe Moran identifies „the everyday‟ as a category that brings together lived culture and
representation „in a way that makes sense of, but also obscures, the reality of cultural change
and social difference‟ (Moran, 2005:13). This change happens incessantly but without ever