Social Representations of the Sports Practitioner Blind Body
Sport, Body, Social representations, Visual impairment
Social representations are, in general, the references used by social groups, built through historical, cultural, social contexts, among others, for the interpretation and classification of situations experienced in everyday life, interfering in daily activities by through the positions adopted by the subjects. The Theory of Social Representations, formulated in the last century by the social psychologist Serge Moscovici, seeks to understand exactly how this construction of references, which is both individual and collective, occurs. Such construction has historically had the body as one of the most important problematic scopes. Sensory organs are known to play an important role in the construction of body image. Thus, when thinking about the visually impaired person, a major question emerges: how does this being that does not have access to sensory information from the eyes represent his/her construction as a body? It is notorious that the discriminations suffered by the visually impaired bodies directly interfere with their representation of themselves. In this sense, sports practice emerges as a tool to break this situation. That said, this paper aimed to analyze the social representations that visually impaired bodies practicing sports have of themselves. It was a field research with qualitative approach. Data were collected from 17 visually impaired sports practitioners. The Free Word Association Test was used to investigate the content of the representation, the prototypic analysis in openEvoc 0.84 software to perform the search for the structure and central nucleus and the semi-structured interview to verify the centrality. The results show that the visually impaired bodies participating in the research think about themselves in a fragmented way, with the various parts they indicate as their means of being bodies in the world. In addition, it was found that sports experience interferes with the social representations that the studied group has about the body. Finally, it was identified that visually impaired people who play sports are able to recognize their potentialities and, thus, go against the stigma that has historically reduced them, treating them only as beings with profound limitations.