This study used a critical ethnographic approach to explore how women with disabling conditions define themselves and their relationships within the social, political, economic, and cultural contexts of their lives. The extant ideology that has guided disability research has rendered invisible the lives of women with disabilities. Through dialogic processes central to the critical ethnographic method, this study explicates how these women have created their life meanings, have become aware of prevailing ideology, and have interacted in their social worlds to bring about change.

Through intensive interviewing, participant observation, and ongoing reflexive analysis, the stories of the nineteen participants' lives were created. Through a continuous and progressive process, transcribed texts were analyzed at two levels--the identification of narrative themes and the search for patterns across themes.

Three significant and related themes evidenced themselves within the texts of the women's stories. Voice included issues around the silencing of the women's voices and the denial of their individual and collective reality by others and by themselves, the ways in which the women began to listen to and find their own voices through self awareness (including awareness of the body through "body talk") and finally how the women learned to use their voices, alone and with others in interaction with their social environment. Visibility highlights how the reality of the women was altered to such an extent that they became invisible, even to themselves; how they engaged in games of "hide and seek" with formal support networks; the processes through which they publicly identified themselves as women with disabilities; and their visions for creating new realities of disablement. Virtue reflects stories about value, worth, beauty, justice and morality. Moving through the world with 'ease', creating an equilibrium of energy, compassion for self and others, developing reciprocal relationships and keeping the 'human factor' central in the creation of a just and accessible world for people with disabilities were potent topics of meaning within this final theme.