ABSTRACT
The next stage of the discursive analysis, again following Parker's (1992) framework, involved looking at the data to identify the discursive meanings that participants constructed in relation to lesbian and gay identities and then to look at how they were positioned and positioned themselves in relation to available discourses. In this stage of the data analysis, the author used Parker's (1992) approach to identifying positions available within a discourse by asking what kind of space the discourse makes available for particular kinds of self to step in. The silences in people's accounts, and Jane's account of using silence, can be seen as strategies of resistance to being positioned within a pathologizing discourse. As well as these silences in people's accounts, and their accounts of using silence, there were also contradictions both within and across accounts, which are a reflection of the polarized discursive positions available.
