The Whole Mess

While the social model of disability reframes disablement as a product of structural barriers, it still does not fully account for the embodied experience of pain. Garland-Thomson’s (2011)¹ concept of “misfitting” provides an alternative to the social model’s assumption that disability is purely a product of external barriers. Instead of treating disability as a fixed category, misfitting emphasizes the specific, context-dependent interactions between individuals and their environments. Rather than viewing disability as a fixed identity, misfitting highlights the instability of disablement itself. Disability is not a stable category. There is a constantly shifting relationship between embodiment and environment. Kafer (2013)² reinforces this idea, arguing that disability should not be understood as a static identity group but rather a fluid, context-dependent experience by “[r]efusing any assumption that it refers to a discrete group of particular people with certain similar essential qualities” (p. 7)

Misfitting also explains how certain bodyminds are considered inferior and excluded from public life (Garland-Thomson, 2011, p. 12). Historically, people who misfit have been subject to elimination, exclusion, and violence. Misfitting is not just about discomfort but about real material consequences. Even in everyday life, misfitting shapes how we move through the world and how our bodyminds are judged.

While misfitting offers a valuable framework for understanding disability, it still assumes that disablement requires an external environmental mismatch. Chronic pain does not always require an external context; it can be disabling purely through internal experience. Pain does not always fit neatly into the misfitting framework because it is often experienced as a deeply personal and individualized embodiment rather than a social experience of exclusion. Unlike mobility impairments that may “misfit” in inaccessible environments, pain, fatigue, and cognitive fog can be equally disabling in spaces designed for accessibility. This highlights the instability of disablement, that pain is neither purely internal nor entirely determined by environmental barriers but emerges in the shifting interaction between the two. This tension between external misfitting and internal pain suggests that a new framework is needed, one that acknowledges both the social and deeply embodied nature of pain and disability.

Next, I turn to Siebers’s (2017)³ concept of “complex embodiment.” As he describes it, “[w]ithout returning to a medical model, which labels individuals as defective, the next step for disability studies is to develop a theory of complex embodiment that values disability as a form of human variation” (p. 284). That, in fact, it “embraces what the body has become and will become relative to the demands on it, whether environmental, representational, or corporeal” (p. 285).

Siebers (2017) critiques the assumption that recognizing disability as socially constructed is “sufficient to undo any of its negative effects” (p. 288). This is particularly relevant to chronic pain, which remains disabling even when its social construction is acknowledged. My experience reinforces this tension. While cultural understandings mediate my pain, those constructs do not erase their bodily impact. This suggests that disablement cannot be neatly categorized as either entirely social or embodied but instead emerges from their intersection. Wendell (1996)⁴ also acknowledges this distinction. Even after having dedicated an entire chapter to disability as a social construction, she admits that “a major aspect of [her] experience was precisely that of being forced to acknowledge and learn to live with bodily, not cultural, limitation” (p. 169).

Nevertheless, chronic pain does not exist in isolation but is shaped by mental, emotional, and societal factors. Sheppard (2020)⁵ expounds on this: “The sociocultural discursive construct of ‘pain’ and of ‘body’ has a deep impact on how we know/understand our bodyminds, and what we recognise as ‘body’ sensation” (p. 39) Goodley (2017)⁶ also walks this fine line between the discussion and impact of impairment and how we can only know it “in relation to that which is upheld… The meaning of impairment is culturally constructed because bodies/minds have histories and are experienced, performed and institutionally located” (p. 36). This reinforces the central challenge of locating disablement: while chronic pain resists easy categorization, it remains deeply felt and deeply real. The instability of disablement requires an even broader lens that moves beyond misfitting and complex embodiment to consider alternative ways of relating to pain.

Series so far:
Intro
Positionality
A Personal Case Study in Disablement
Tensions With the Medical Model
Struggling With the Social Model

1. Garland-Thomson, R. (2011). Misfits: A feminist materialist disability concept. Hypatia, 26(3), 591–609. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2011.01206.x ↩︎
2. Kafer, A. (2013). Feminist, queer, crip. Indiana University Press. ↩︎
3. Siebers, T. (2017). Disability and the theory of complex embodiment—For identity politics in a new register. In The Disability Studies Reader (5th edition, p. 554). Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. ↩︎
4. Wendell, S. (1996). The rejected body: Feminist philosophical reflections on disability. Routledge. ↩︎
5. Sheppard, E. (2020). Performing normal but becoming crip: Living with chronic pain. Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research, 22(1), 39–47. https://doi.org/10.16993/sjdr.619 ↩︎
6. Goodley, D. (2017). Disability studies: An interdisciplinary introduction (2nd edition). SAGE. ↩︎