Living with a partly amputated face, doing facial difference

Abstract

Disability studies as an academic field has long sought to highlight the lived experiences of people with disabilities, thereby giving voice to a population that has been the object of much discourse but rarely its subject. Despite the field’s engagement with various conditions, there is limited scholarly work on the personal meanings of amputation and prosthetics usage. Experiences associated with the loss of part(s) of the face, in particular, have remained uncharted. In this article, I address this lacuna by drawing on interviews with twenty affected individuals. Situating their accounts in contemporary scholarship on bodily difference within the humanities and social sciences, I demonstrate that losing part(s) of the face calls for various ways of ‘doing’ difference in everyday life. This empirical-philosophical analysis serves three purposes. On an empirical level, the article unpacks the everyday doing of facial difference, showing it simultaneously involves social, embodied, and material dimensions. On a practical level, this integrative understanding of facial difference complements prevalent approaches to ‘disfi gurement’ that construe it as an individual—biomedical or psychosocial—problem. On a theoretical level the article clarifi es and advances the concept of doing, which plays a key role in gender studies, phenomenology, and science and technology studies.

Keywords

• facial difference
• disfigurement
• disability
• prosthesis
• enactment
• embodiment