“Your head hurts but you’re holding your tummy” The co-production of children’s bodily experience through talk and gesture in family interaction
| Author: | Jenkins, Laura |
| Abstract: | |
| Feeling ill and other childhood bodily experiences have often been approached as mental concepts that develop cognitively, such as knowledge about physical functions. Rather than approaching being unwell in terms of individual experience and cognition, I adopt the framework of Discursive Psychology in which putatively private, cognitive and experiential states are handled and managed in talk and social interaction. Thus the expression and formulation of bodily sensations are examined as elements of interactional practice, produced through talk and gesture (cf. Heath, 1989). The research conducts conversation analysis on a corpus of 21 mealtimes, which were recorded by three families across the UK who have children with a chronic illness. This study focuses on the organisation of bodily interaction, specifically on how gestures are deployed in sequences where children initiate expressions of physical experience. Analysis reveals that embodied displays of pain or other negative sensations such as holding or rubbing the painful area, moving the body in a way that demonstrates discomfort, and facial expressions such as grimacing, can function to display disengagement with the ‘normative’ tasks associated with mealtimes. Deploying such displays without a lexical formulation provides the opportunity for the co-participant to initiate a ‘noticing’. Deployed in co-ordination with lexical formulations they allow the teller to initiate a new topic by announcing the physical sensation. I examine how embodied displays and reports of physical experience are oriented to and managed by parents in the subsequent interaction, in ways that can be more or less affiliative, and consider what these carefully organised sequences accomplish practically in everyday life. |
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