ABSTRACT

My analysis approach began at the first or manifest level in Chapters 2 and 3, where I foregrounded the biographic narratives of eight disabled women and it continues in this chapter with an analysis of the narratives, which produces distinctive themes. Whilst the analysis of narratives employs paradigmatic analysis, which produces themes as is common in other qualitative research studies, what differentiates it from other approaches is that it takes stories as its primary data for analysis (Polkinghorne, 1995). As such, the themes that I present in this chapter arise from the stories that disabled women told about their experiences of sexuality. Although I make reference to the narratives that I have presented in the previous chapters, I do not repeat quotes that I have already presented in those chapters. However, I draw direct quotes from the eight narratives that I have not presented in Chapters 2 and 3. In addition, and drawing from literature, a conceptual framework of critical feminist disability studies (FDS), and my own perspectives, I provide linking commentaries to both my references to quotes and the direct quotes. I take it that in the previous two chapters, the direct quotes of the narratives of disabled women ‘spoke’ for themselves; hence, at this second level of analysis, I seek to articulate the meaning of the data. As I previously indicated, my three-tier approach to data analysis ends in the following chapter, where I present a deeper layer of analysis, which is intertwined with the discussion of the findings of the study, out of which this book arises.