Start Date
19-6-2025 9:00 AM
End Date
19-6-2025 10:30 AM
Abstract
Key Words: disability; fitness; physical activity; socialization; identity; ableism; medicalization; normalization
Introduction: Medicalizing or normalizing imperatives dominate explored benefits of physical activity for disabled people. Even inclusivity risks assimilation. Social and identity related benefits, along with experiential aspects of physical activity, are overlooked. Physical activity provides opportunity for exercising autonomy, exploring identity, and embracing disability.
Methods: Traditional literature reviews risk reproducing medicalized approaches to physical activity. This literature review combines components of traditional literature review methodologies for unique analytic flexibility. I leverage my lived experience as a disabled scholar, targeting social and identity-related aspects of physical activity. Literature search combines snowball and purposive literature sampling, also incorporating theoretical or operational construct sampling.
Results: Preliminary results reveal ways disabled people value fitness. Personally meaningful and appropriate goals can establish or repair long-term relationships with physical activity. Disabled people’s fitness pursuits reject ableist expectations and exhibit disabled embodiment of fitness, while paradoxically entrenching nondisabled values. They can exhibit elite performance and aesthetics as conceptualized within nondisabled norms, but demonstrate diverse embodiments and interpretations of these values. Fitness pursuits can lead to converging activist and athletic identities. Finally, fitness spaces reflect and amplify broader societal ableism.
Conclusion: Physical activity must be valued for its experiential aspects and potential for exercising autonomy, engaging socially, and exploring identity. Inclusive efforts need to be mindful of experiential aspects of physical activity, avoid assimilating disabled people into nondisabled practices, and consider disabled ways of being and doing as cues for transforming space and practice.
Recommended Citation
Kuehl, Cade, "Identity Formation and Social Benefits at the Intersection of Disability and Fitness: Leveraging Disabled Lived Experience to Re-Evaluate Physical Activity" (2025). International Symposium of Adapted Physical Activity and International Symposium on Physical Activity and Visual Impairment and Deafblindness. 10.
https://sword.mtu.ie/isapa/2025/day4/10
Identity Formation and Social Benefits at the Intersection of Disability and Fitness: Leveraging Disabled Lived Experience to Re-Evaluate Physical Activity
Key Words: disability; fitness; physical activity; socialization; identity; ableism; medicalization; normalization
Introduction: Medicalizing or normalizing imperatives dominate explored benefits of physical activity for disabled people. Even inclusivity risks assimilation. Social and identity related benefits, along with experiential aspects of physical activity, are overlooked. Physical activity provides opportunity for exercising autonomy, exploring identity, and embracing disability.
Methods: Traditional literature reviews risk reproducing medicalized approaches to physical activity. This literature review combines components of traditional literature review methodologies for unique analytic flexibility. I leverage my lived experience as a disabled scholar, targeting social and identity-related aspects of physical activity. Literature search combines snowball and purposive literature sampling, also incorporating theoretical or operational construct sampling.
Results: Preliminary results reveal ways disabled people value fitness. Personally meaningful and appropriate goals can establish or repair long-term relationships with physical activity. Disabled people’s fitness pursuits reject ableist expectations and exhibit disabled embodiment of fitness, while paradoxically entrenching nondisabled values. They can exhibit elite performance and aesthetics as conceptualized within nondisabled norms, but demonstrate diverse embodiments and interpretations of these values. Fitness pursuits can lead to converging activist and athletic identities. Finally, fitness spaces reflect and amplify broader societal ableism.
Conclusion: Physical activity must be valued for its experiential aspects and potential for exercising autonomy, engaging socially, and exploring identity. Inclusive efforts need to be mindful of experiential aspects of physical activity, avoid assimilating disabled people into nondisabled practices, and consider disabled ways of being and doing as cues for transforming space and practice.