Abstract
The work of occupational therapists to do with ordinary-everyday activities of others is ambivalently represented. Indeed current notions of ‘regulated evidence’ and ‘wise practice’ can present clashing traditions for occupational therapists. Writing practice differently since the 1980s, I am interested in internal and external representations of lived bodies in practice. This chapter, about the role that representations(s) might play in better understanding practice and the body, draws on selected moments of my occupational therapy work from the 1980s. Each fictive re-telling of a selected article from my body of work placed in dialogue with a corresponding tale was presented in a portfolio of autoethnographic tales of sexuality, food and death. The excerpts in this chapter show the socio-material comportment of a 30-something occupational therapist going about her youth-specific practice in a paediatric hospital. Having a woman’s lived and practising body located in the foreground of these autoethnographic re-tellings provides a series of unexpected (re)presentations of professional practice. Professional comportment is disciplined and shaped through a series of experiences of comfort and discomfort occurring within, on and around a lived and practised body, as well as what inter-professional others notice about each other’s demeanour and conduct on a hospital ward.
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Notes
- 1.
For example, later in the chapter, the hands are represented in a tale of sexuality and the therapist character’s limit-setting eyebrows feature in a tale of food.
- 2.
Notions of occupational therapist as ‘transporter’ and her folkloric potential as a ‘gypsy nomad’ are taken up later in the chapter.
- 3.
Examples from the food-related practice of the therapist character ‘Sally’s’ sensory preferences for smell and taste occur later in the chapter.
- 4.
Integral to the approach to embodied writing taken during my autoethnographic doctorate was that my tales of practice were in dialogue with selected published articles from a body of work. I refer to body in the sense of a body of writing, an assemblage of 25 years of published writings that coheres as a whole, a ‘body of writing’. Both the institutional body of the hospital and my body of published work ‘figure as metaphor, literally as trope’ (Green and Hopwood, Chap. 2 this volume) in this chapter.
- 5.
First, as an experienced therapist anticipating motherhood; second, becoming an academic at an inland university; and, third, becoming a doctoral student.
- 6.
French is the colonial language spoken in Noumea. In French, menstruation can be translated literally as ‘the moment of the moon’, so in the tale the moon is emblematic of menstrual time. The moon is also considered as a celestial body.
- 7.
Page numbers for this and subsequent excerpts are from Denshire (2009).
- 8.
Recently, I asked a second-year class of occupational therapy students what the term ‘gypsy nomad’ meant to them. A forthcoming student replied: ‘Oh that’s an old person who travels around’ (i.e., what the media refer to as a ‘grey nomad’). Perhaps as a 60-year-old academic (feeling young, looking older) I seemed a soon-to-be ‘grey nomad’ in her eyes? I suggested that a ‘nomad’ could actually be someone of any age who moved around, and that a ‘gypsy’ is a person kept outside the dominant culture. This inter-generational dialogue between occupational therapy student and her teacher felt both awkward and productive. Other students also objected to the ‘gypsy nomad’ image of an occupational therapist because, they said, ‘gypsy nomad’ suggested that you ‘didn’t belong’, ‘that you weren’t stable’ or ‘part of the team’. Nevertheless, mobile, unsettled practitioners in colourful garb have often been the case for practising occupational therapists, as a kind of stereotype. It was like this for me in the 1980s, and may still be the case for practitioners now, on the margins in new or controversial practice areas, in an increasingly regulated profession.
- 9.
The Turkish words for ‘mother’ and ‘father’.
- 10.
For someone without hands or someone unable to use them, hands may be little more than the symbol that an able body is the norm (Hammell 2009).
- 11.
For further details on this autoethnographic methodology, see Denshire and Lee (2013).
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Denshire, S. (2015). Looking Like an Occupational Therapist: (Re)presentations of Her Comportment within Autoethnographic Tales. In: Green, B., Hopwood, N. (eds) The Body in Professional Practice, Learning and Education. Professional and Practice-based Learning, vol 11. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-00140-1_14
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