"The constant fear of ceasing to move": Deconstructing movement in physiotherapy

Abstract

Physiotherapy is fundamentally based on and mediated by movement, but how “movement” is understood must be challenged. Movement is often understood instrumentally in physiotherapy. Drawing on the work of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, by deconstructing movement in physiotherapy, we aim to foreground such movement that mainstream conceptions of physiotherapeutic movement silence, ignore, or take less seriously. We perform our deconstructive reading of movement through texts generated with Finnish psychophysical physiotherapists about the meanings they give to movement, on the one hand, and staying still, on the other. We focus on dichotomies and hierarchies in the texts and seek to overturn and reinscribe them, and to begin re-writing the story of movement for physiotherapy. One such counter-writing we suggest, but which will remain to be written, is economic: How do we overcome a prevailing capitalocentric mode of thinking that mediates movement?