Living with Brain Injury: Narrative, Community, and Women’s Renegotiation of Identity

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216 > 217 the women confronted them in their everyday, situated lives; they drew on different biographical experiences and priorities in their responses. In one way or another, most of them said that it was up to them. The struggles were personal, too, because they were so often made personal and individual by others. They involved the facts of being alive: work, school, church membership, health care, transportation, intimacy, and status and value as a person and citizen. But those struggles were framed as personal, private, and idiosyncratic problems by narratives of individualism, economic pragmatism, and normalization. That is, practices and discourses of individualization and separation continually worked to construct their struggles as private, physiological, or intrapsychic , even as moral failures, and thereby often deny them grounds for legitimate resistance or refusal, to position them as isolated strangers , and to recruit them into disdain for their post-injury self. The women’s narratives, identities, and communities contribute to critical frameworks for identifying and challenging complicated and intersecting ideologies—the dominant narratives of ability, gender, race, age, and the economy, along with those about vulnerability and dependence —from which social injustice, segregation and oppression derive their energy and legitimacy. That is, the women’s accounts illuminate the ideologies that construct reality, for the disabled and nondisabled alike, and that entangled and destabilized—but did not negate—their agency. The women required, and often deployed, different kinds of critical consciousness about their social position in the reauthoring of identity, relationships, and meaning post-injury. Clearly, critical consciousness (political and metaphysical) and the forms of oppositional counternarratives they enabled weren’t acquired evenly or at once, nor were they evenly deployed over time and contexts; it was an ongoing, social process that involved contradictions and iterations. Critical consciousness , which I am concluding is necessary to reauthoring a habitable and affirmative identity post-injury, depended largely on connections and engagement with other people with disabilities, and time. The reauthoring of identity post-injury entailed an ongoing and complex set of negotiations that married adaptation to opposition (Gramsci, 1971). The women did have to adapt to new functional limitations and the realization that their lives would now be different, and differently difficult, both materially and socially. The authoring process 218 > 219 even a nodding acquaintance with feminist psychology or the sex/gender distinction (see, for example, Fausto-Sterling, 2012; Rubin, 1993; Samuels, 2011). What is not so straightforward is how particular people work out both resisting being relegated to the pathological heap of the disabled assembled through individualization and constructing an affirmative identity that incorporates disability and other disabled people . How does a person come to correctly locate the source of “disdain” for a disability identity and overcome it? For all the reasons that Freud could never figure out “what women want,” the shift to a protest stance must involve terms and positions different from those that created the problem. Many of the accounts referenced how sources and resources of help were also laced with the unhelpful traces of ableism, of disqualification, objectification, or disempowerment (as in rehab, at church, work, or school, even among other disabled people). Merely consulting with disabled people about what they want does not remedy a history of diminished autonomy (Barnes, 2003). Holistic or social neuropsychology, client-centered care, sensitive psychotherapy, community reintegration projects, or even emancipatory research, do not evade the social problematic at the heart of disability: if disabled people are subject to the internalization of dominant definitions and values of disability just like those who are nondisabled, then “asking clients about their personal goals is not a pat solution” (Snyder & Mitchell, 2006, 8). This is particularly true to the extent that these practices and questions are anchored in the acute medical context. Confronting the ways the women have been objectified, divided against themselves and from others, and recruited into particular subjectivities is a struggle of identity and of identification. In one way and location or another, they had to assert their uniqueness and affirm their difference, to be seen and responded to as individuals. They had to find ways and grounds to refuse everything that isolated them through a reduction to a singular and individual pathology and classification, everything that worked to embarrass them, to objectify them, to make them abject, and to constrain their identities. That is, struggles for a positive disability identity involve both an affirmative recognition and valuation of difference and a resistance...