Qualitative Inquiry

This piece is an adaptation from my book, After a Fall: A Sociomedical Sojourn. It is an autoethnographic account of my first two days in a rehabilitation facility following ankle surgery. It introduces how class, gender, race, ethnicity, and aging intersect each other in the facility.

This article is inspired by Laurel Richardson’s ongoing work as a scholar and researcher during her “retirement.” Lorelei has been inspired by Laurel to imagine her retirement as still a time of productive scholarly contribution. This, despite the messages she has received, overtly and covertly, of her redundancy. Here, we follow Lorelei as she stories the disruption, conflicts, and tensions of transition from work life to retirement. Her introspection reveals that this life transition is unlike any other for her. This one is defined more by loss than gain, and Lorelei finds it uncomfortable to embody the juncture of “productivity” and “age”—clearly on the “wrong” side of each binary. Three issues are at the heart of her process: the importance of identity, the process of transitioning from employment to retirement, and the identities that society makes available postemployment. We use autoethnography with commentary to understand Lorelei’s experience in the context of the present social, cultural, and political historical moment. Laurel Richardson and her scholarship are integral to this piece in the permissions she has granted us: to both explore this space and to explore it in this way.

In this article, we heed lessons from Laurel Richardson’s After a Fall: A Sociomedical Sojourn to investigate how nondisabled high school–aged girls are affected by their volunteer experiences in Believe Ballet, a nonprofit organization that provides primary- and secondary-school-aged girls with physical disabilities with the opportunity to dance and perform ballet. Drawing on a qualitative content analysis of three academic years of volunteers’ pre- and post-participation questionnaires, this article focuses specifically on changes in volunteers’ self-reported perceptions of disability and ability. This article also points to directions for future research in the fields of disability, feminist disability, and ableism studies.

Reflecting on the omnirelevant categories that inform our lives, we narrate our embodied experiences at the intersection of the social axes of differences informed by being transnationals in the United States. With a strong difference in our backgrounds as transnationals in the United States, we reflect on markers that highlight differences to incite resistance, acceptance, interrogation, and accommodation. Following Richardson’s format of writing, we use journal entries and an email conversation to discuss the interlocking ways in which social axes of differences play out in our lives and spaces of privileges that we occupy, creating normalcy for us until we have to engage in a contrasting experience challenging the normalcy. Finally, we argue that the interlocking ways in which we engage with various discursive spaces of difference blur efforts of resistance and accommodation by creating a permanent state of shuttling between intersected subject positions of difference.

Signaling scholarship from Laurel Richardson, this essay is a performative reflection on three embodied axes of social difference as articulated through autoethnographic expressions of experience: a man who suffers from gynocomastia, a woman who suffers with Crohn’s Disease, and another women who was a chronic self-injurer. Each performative reflection serves as a vulnerable act of self-disclosure, resistance, and control. Each, according to Richardson, is a product of critical discernment that cannot be separated from the producer, the mode of production, the method of knowing, and its role as a collective story; displaying an individual’s story by narrativizing the experiences of the social category to which the individual belongs. Each story pivots on the construct of bodies yearning on the borders of becoming.

This is a narrative about embodiment, difference, and, most of all, pain. What happens when the body is broken and pain becomes the center of one’s daily life? How does one learn to accept disability? Written at the intersection of arts-based inquiry and autoethnography, I utilize poetry to communicate the transformation of my mind and body after a car accident forced me to reevaluate how I understood embodiment.

How are ways of knowing legitimized and delegitimized in higher education? Dyslexic ways of knowing stem from the process of being institutionally disciplined out of certain ways of knowing and the social interaction that accompany this process. A dyslexic methodology resembles some core characteristics of collage and performative writing: collage with its multiple meanings and non-linear structure and performative writing with its focus on the body and creative use of symbols. Informed by dyslexic ways of knowing, a dyslexic methodology resembles collage and performative writing and works to destabilize normative knowledge production in higher education.