ABSTRACT
Most conventional modes of qualitative analysis are concerned with categorization and the production of neat, coherent and tidy 'themes'. Comic subversive stories and resistant storylines were often entangled with/in affirming birth assemblages. Women narrated positive birth experiences in which they were agents and heroines, when they were warmly located within a mesh of connectivity and body-to-body support. Women told two kinds of fleshy counter stories, one that produced pleasure and joy and another that told corpomaterial experiences of trauma and distress. Birth is a unique psychofleshy experience in which pain, satisfaction and joy are intertwined in complex and distinctive ways that differ radically from other experiences of bodily pain such as illness or injury. Experiences of distress were either told via fleshy chaos telling or converted into testimonial narratives. Testimonial narratives were found to be a central mode of birth storytelling used by low-income women who had given birth in public sector settings.
