The collective story also acted on participants by instilling in them a sense of
empowerment to challenge disabling practices they had experienced beyond the gym in wider society. One example of this is the conversation which occurred between Susan, Kathleen and Terry as they socialized between work outs:
Susan:” I remember having a conversation with my occupational therapist and he said ‘what do you want to do after this?’ I said ‘…I want to show a different side to
138 disability that isn’t tragic and isn’t inspirational.’ He asked if I wanted to do any other activities and I said,’ you know what? I don't want to be one of those labelled people that has to go skydiving or has to go bungee jumping because I’m disabled....’ Everybody can do that but I want to be doing just regular sports or going to the gym and just be happy. I don't feel obliged to go jump off something.”
Kathleen: “See I felt quite patronised when they (SCI charities) came onto the ward looking for you to sign up to go skydiving or climb Snowden…and I think it makes big promises that you are going to feel amazing at the end of it.”
Susan: “No I wouldn’t, I’d feel shit! I wouldn’t entertain it.”
Kathleen: “No I wouldn’t! What happens if you don’t?”
Susan: “You’re either gonna kill yourself or do nothing at all. There’s no intermediate.”
Kathleen: “Yeah you’re in or out. If you don’t fit the mould, too bad. I’d have jumped at the chance to exercise again and get back to just normal stuff but that’s not an option. It’s not good enough because we’re not normal and not allowed to be normal, no. Would I heck jump out a plane before, why would I want to now?!”
Terry: “Totally right. I hate that. It’s like I’m failing if I’m not doing something unbelievable. Going to the gym and being active isn’t good enough.”
Kathleen: “Yeah!”
Susan: “Yeah! I just want to be considered as a regular person and not a regular person wanting to be amazing. That’s what I’m wanting to show people here. Happy, healthy, normal, not extraordinary.” (Susan, SCI, 35; Kathleen, SCI, 32; Terry, visual impairment, 35)
139 Through continued dialogue between participants in the gym, the collective story continued to work to do things on participants. In this case, participants felt empowered in the supportive, understanding group environment to discuss disabling experiences they had encountered as a result of society’s depiction of disability and the limited available identities these individuals could claim. As Wendell (1996) argued, in groups disabled people can openly and powerfully challenge assumptions such as the idealization of the body and stereotypes of disability. Drawing upon Nelson and Lindemann (2001), in society it appears the supercrip narrative is the master narrative. This narrative positions disabled people as tragic heroes who are expected to do, and want to do, extraordinary feats to go above and beyond their disability to overcome it, defy odds and promote a positive identity (Berger, 2008). If disabled people do not align to this identity they are deemed to reproduce and reinforce disabled people's inferior positionality (Kama, 2004). Although the supercrip
narrative may seem more favourable than a personal tragedy narrative which situates disabled individuals as dependent, weak, and subjects of pity (Shakespeare, 1994), it is still oppressive in that it dictates who disabled people are supposed to be and does not represent the majority of disabled peoples’ sense of self (Riley, 2005; Wendell, 1996). In response, participants used a counter story to reclaim their experience of disability and desired self, in this case telling a story of exercising in the gym as someone seeking to be active for health and becoming individuals who can actively resist oppression by sharing this story with other people. The strength to challenge the master narratives of society shows the solidifying power of the collective story as it helped participants resist oppression and potentially worked to help motivate them to continue exercising and training as they could claim an identity which made sense to them and helped positively shape their exercise experiences with peers.
140 In this chapter I have presented how exercising together as a peer group allowed participants to craft a collective story which facilitated their desire to resist oppression in the gym. Through the various dialogical components of this story, participants’ previous
experiences of disablement were validated and reshaped not as their fault but the fault of the gym. Moreover, through hearing other people’s stories and crafting a narrative which made sense to them, participants were able to craft a more affirmative identity and begin to
challenge the societal perceptions of disability which they so desired to do. Resisting the gym through their presence was also an act they had desired to do (see chapter five) and as part of a group they were given more confidence and drive that this ambition was possible.
Problematically, although participants’ experiences of exercising with peers were generally positive, as time progressed training became more difficult and this once united group were divided. This I present in the next chapter.
141
Narrative Movement: Negotiating and
Making Meaning from Gym Instructor
Training
7.0 Overview
The final chapter of this section focuses on participants’ gym instructor training experiences. As highlighted in chapter six, participants were initially a united group who crafted a collective story which worked on them in various ways. As training progressed, however, this once united group were divided and over half of the participants dropped out of
142 the programme. The purpose of this chapter is to explore why this happened. To do so, I conducted a DNA to explore how participants made meaning from their continued training experiences and what impact this had on their involvement in the InstructAbility programme. From this analysis, I identified that as participants moved through their training, so too did the narratives they drew upon to make sense of their experiences. Specifically, rather than one collective story, two conflicting narratives evolved which split the participants as they either aligned to a narrative of activism or a narrative of desired belonging. Akin to the narrative in chapter six, these stories were constructed dialogically between participants in the sense that rather than one singular voice there were multiple voices which crafted the narratives and its various components (Gubrium & Holstein, 2009). Consequently, the dialogical components of the activism and desired belonging narratives shaped participants’ training experiences and strongly influenced their decision to continue with InstructAbility. These components were (i)
the InstructAbility environment, (ii) divided connection and (iii) (un)realised identities. These
dialogical components worked for some participants by validating their reason for being a gym instructor and allowing them to achieve their desired identity, but worked against others by excluding them from the group that had initially given them a sense of belonging. To present findings of this chapter, I first use a narrative typology to describe the activism and desired belonging narratives. Thereafter, I unpack how the components of these narratives worked on participants and guided their actions.