ABSTRACT
Considerations of ‘challenging behaviour’ by people with disability have been largely associated with naturalized impairment and confined to the realms of clinical intervention and governance. This paper explores the bio-medical association between challenging behaviour and categories of diagnosed impairment and establishes its function as central to the construction of normalcy/abnormalcy for people who are deemed to show behaviours that challenge. The paper offers an alternate reading of challenging behaviour as embodied, emergent, relational and historically contingent. Through the analysis of case studies, the significance of legal, social and clinical responses is examined. It is demonstrated that people who exhibit challenging behaviour are marked as vulnerable to abnormality and on this basis are drawn into relations of intervention which ostensibly work to authorize targeted interventions aimed to restore or assist them to approach ideals of normalcy. In this context, theoretical conceptions of vulnerability are used to disentangle the ambivalent legal and social responsibilities and interventions for people constructed as having challenging behaviour. It is argued that failure to problematize the complex relationships between dependency and vulnerability can result in exacerbation of the ‘challenge’ of behaviour.
