https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800418809731 Qualitative Inquiry 1–10 © The Author(s) 2018 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/1077800418809731 journals.sagepub.com/home/qix Original Article On a rainy winter night in 2016, I, the first author of this article, opened my inbox and saw an invitation to partici- pate in a television production of short documentaries about people with physical disabilities who have a dream that is difficult to realize because of their physical condi- tion. I only took time to roll my eyes, before clicking it away. I wanted to dance, but no way was I going to con- tribute to “boxing up” people like that—not others, and not myself. By the end of the following month, however, my independent search for dance instructors had yielded only a couple of dancers nearby, who could neither inspire me, nor inspire my friend who was aspiring to be my dance partner. My desire to explore how I could move my body—aesthetically, and fuelling connection with myself and with others—had become an important goal for self-care, going far beyond daily physiotherapy ses- sions and me-time bubble baths with rose petals and oil, scrub, and foam gels sparkling like diamonds . . .so I jumped. After an intake interview to check whether I was “screenproof,” a famous Belgian singer and television- presenter knocked on the door of my office, kneeled, and asked me for a dance. Over a time span of 4 months we created a choreogra- phy, developed our muscle-history, and won a bronze medal at an international wheelchair dance competition. We started from a story outline I wrote about myself as a freed woman. I wanted to express a story in which every- one could recognize something of himself or herself, a story of attraction and resistance, confidence and feeling small, within the search for love for one’s self and the other. I started dancing the story that I considered the story of my life. And then I felt, not that the words of now being a liberated woman were untrue, but that I did not embody that liberation in each and every context or assemblage that I found myself in. I came to know intimately that “feeling, desiring and experiencing are not singular characteristics or capaci- ties of human consciousness. Matter feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns and remembers” (Barad, 2012a, p. 59). Through working with the materiality of my body through dance, and through extending that work in the writing of this article, I extended my body’s capacity for the freedom it discovered in the dance. The dance project became an experiment of thinking about my body differently and using my body differ- ently, where I increasingly moved my body on the waves of my own story, and through which I diffractively wove new materalist concepts to make sense of this new agen- tial assemblage. My dance became a method of inviting and visualising “the ongoing, mutual, co-constitution of mind and matter” (Alaimo & Hekman, 2008, p. 5). 809731QIX XX X 10.1177/1077800418809731Qualitative InquiryBlockmans et al. research-article 2018 1 Ghent University, Belgium 2 KU Leuven, Belgium Corresponding Author: Inge G. E. Blockmans, Vakgroep Orthopedagogiek, Ghent University, Henri Dunantlaan 2, Ghent, 9000, Belgium. Email: Inge.Blockmans@UGent.be Retouching and Revisiting the Strangers Within: An Exploration Journey on the Waves of Meaning and Matter in Dance Inge G. E. Blockmans 1,2 , Elisabeth De Schauwer 1 , Geert Van Hove 1 , and Paul Enzlin 2 Abstract This article explores what (working with) matter can tell us that language cannot or does not completely tell, about becoming a sensual, sexual woman free to move smoothly in and with her body. It explores how (working with) matter can transform living in, with and through a body, and how it affects and is affected. The text is centred around “touchpoints,” that is, encounters through touch, as experienced by the first author as a dancer on wheels, and diffracted and narrated through poetry and images interwoven with theory. These encounters are seen as mo(ve)ments in a powerful agential assemblage that holds both danger and transformative possibilities, leading us to reimagine freedom as a river of sparring intensities. Keywords autoethnography, dance, becoming, agential assemblage, touch