Abnormal-Becoming-Normal: Conceptualizations of Childhood Disability in Children’s Rehabilitation Textbooks

Abstract

Despite advancements to theory and practice, children’s rehabilitation is dominated by taken-for-granted assumptions about disability and childhood. In order to address a pressing need for scholarship in this area, this paper draws on post-structuralism, critical disability studies, and disabled children’s childhood studies to interrogate the underlying logics and central assumptions of eight North American children’s rehabilitation textbooks. Using discourse analysis, we highlight how the discourse of normal/abnormal is pervasive and underpins the understandings and logics deployed throughout the texts. We argue that the texts construct disabled children as abnormal-becoming-normal, and thus reinforce a moral imperative whereby disabled children are understood as requiring motivation and self-efficacy to lead a ‘good’/normal life. In drawing on these reductive understandings, children’s rehabilitation relies on a disempowering conception of disabled children as lacking, and thus fails to acknowledge and appreciate the many ways in which disabled children can be and become.