ABSTRACT
Approaching people and their experiences of sexual pleasure as continually in a state of becoming, we have aimed to allow for and explore these movements throughout data gathering, analysis, and presentation of a study on the sexual wellbeing of (four) women with traumatic (i.e., non-congenital) spinal cord injury. The data-gathering methods—ranging from individual life story interviews over “on-the-road” conversations during fieldwork to a focus group discussion—aimed to provide the participants with different routes by which to reflect on their subjective experience of the bodies in/with/through which they live, and intimate relationships in the past, present and future, sometimes resulting in a transformation of their sense of self and their bodily expression potential. The assembled glimpses of life were analysed by drawing on post-intentional phenomenology and plugging in the concepts of containment and sexual and intimate pleasure as becoming. Through a mix of autoethnography, fiction and participants' words, the metaphor of a chastity belt is presented to capture how material-discursive practices around sexuality, touch and (health)care as well as the women’s “own” meaning-giving of sexual pleasure and their body, challenge their imaginative manoeuvrability, i.e., imagination related to one’s potential for sexual pleasure.
(disability studies, qualitative research, women, spinal cord injury)
