Severe motor impairments generate disability situations in which the autonomy of body and of the subject are disrupted. Expectations and taken-for-granted attitudes regarding the valid body are challenged. No longer in capacity to act directly on themselves or on their environment, persons with disabilities must interact with polymorphic help devices consisting of both human and technical aids. In these interactions, limitations between self and others or between inside and outside are blurred.Based on three ethnographic studies conducted with persons with disabilities living at home, the doctoral research aims at analyzing their specific corporal experience. The first part of the dissertation analyzes the experience of people with severe motor impairments as an experience of a distributed body, alternating between self-destruction and empirical negotiations of body frontiers with reference to intimacy. The second part distinguishes three forms of the experience of everyday life with severe motor impairments, which result in different distributions of the frontiers of self
