Encounters With the White Coat: Confessions of a Sexuality and Disability Researcher in a Wheelchair in Becoming

Abstract

In this autoethnographic essay, I will deconstruct my own being and becoming of a female researcher with a spinal cord injury (SCI) in the first half of my doctoral research on the sexual well-being of women with SCI, more specifically in the aftermath of a 1-month internship at a rehabilitation hospital where I assisted the health care team and had informal conversations with residents. Following Barad’s plead for diffractive methodologies, I aim to track interference patterns of the range of relationalities—imagined or mobilized by myself or by others—that I embraced or shied away from during my fieldwork based on field notes and memory to discover from them the constant process of my own becoming-in-the-world with a “broken body.”