Abstract
- This analysis traces the emergence of post-accident professional identity through seven open-ended personal narrative performances with a focus on one narrator who ‘passes’ as her pre-accident self in initial encounters. Together the narrators illuminate the daily performance of post-accident professionalism as a struggle over a shared fear of embodied mortality that is intensified within a cultural space rooted in discourses of enlightenment humanism that seek to exalt the mind through controlling the body. Through exposing these fears we can begin to create a professional space that embraces bodies that remind us of the inescapable vulnerability of the flesh through which our identities emerge in daily performance.