Communicative disability and stories: Towards an embodied conception of narratives

Abstract

In this article we show that persons with communicative disabilities are often involved in storytelling that does not necessarily conform to the conventional expectations of what constitutes a narrative. By analyzing the relationship between story and storytelling event, and the relation between what could be called the primary storyteller and the vicarious storyteller, we show that storytellers with communicative disabilities are often quite inventive in finding ways of presenting themselves as competent storytellers even though they may have certain problems vocally animating a coherent, structured story. This lead us to conclude a necessary redefinition of what a narrative is - that it could be performed as well as it could be told - and that such a redefinition stresses methodological issues: in order to be able to study the life stories of people with communicative disabilities we need to use both narrative and ethnographic research methods.

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