Touch Me, I’m Sick: Hysterical Intimacies | Sick Theories

by

Margeaux Feldman

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctorate of Philosophy Department of English University of Toronto

© Copyright by Margeaux Feldman 2021 ! Touch Me, I’m Sick: Hysterical Intimacies | Sick Theories

Margeaux Feldman

Doctorate of Philosophy

Department of English University of Toronto

2021 Abstract This dissertation develops what I call a “sick theories” approach to the long history of labeling girls, women, and femmes – and their desires – as hysterical, sick, pathological, and in need of a cure. My approach builds on the insight that repressed trauma can lead to chronic illness, which was discovered in the early twentieth century with the emergence of the figure of the hysteric: a girl or woman experiencing inexplicable symptoms, from a persistent cough to full body seizures. Drawing on recent work in trauma studies, I offer a new lens to disability studies by reclaiming the figure of the hysteric, who has been largely neglected in this field. By examining a range of literary and cultural texts, I trace new connections between those who are living with trauma, chronic illness, and pathologized desire, and develop a language for imagining new forms of community and care, which I call “hysterical intimacies.”

Each chapter builds on my sick theories approach, outlined in Chapter One, to analyze a different sick girl. Chapter Two looks at Jesmyn Ward’s novel Salvage the Bones to challenge the state’s narrative that the pregnant Black teen is part of an epidemic and reveal new dimensions of state sponsored anti-Black violence. In recognizing teen pregnancy as endemic new modes of community care, that cross species lines, open up. Chapter Three focuses on Marie

Calloway’s what purpose did i serve in your life and Catherine Fatima’s Sludge Utopia, which

ii depict what I call “ugly sex” – sex that both repulses you and gets you off. In embracing this ambivalence, these women refuse to have their desires pathologized. Chapter Four compares archival photographs of hysterics with Instagram selfies by authors Esmé Weijun Wang and

Porochista Khakpour to demonstrate how chronically ill women reimagine communal forms of care that reject the neoliberal valorization of the individual. Ultimately, this dissertation shows how trauma and sickness enable new forms of relationality and community. These “hysterical intimacies” make it possible to show up in a world full of systemic violence with all of our trauma and sickness and imagine better worlds to come.

iii Land Acknowledgment

The majority of this dissertation was written on Treaty 13 land, the traditional and ongoing territory of the Anishinaabe, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, the Wendat, and the Mississaugas of the Credit River. Toronto/ Tkaronto is part of the Dish With One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant, an agreement between the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and various allied nations to peaceably share the land. The dish represents the Great Lakes and the spoon represents our commitment to sharing resources. It is no mistake that it’s a spoon, rather than a knife or fork, as a spoon cannot be as easily weaponized.

Settler colonialism brought with it many weapons, including an investment in pathologization. In my dissertation, I seek to name some of the stakes of the continued investment in pathologization, and the impacts it has on girls, women, and femmes. But I do not talk about how pathologization impacts Indigenous communities, who experience trauma and sickness at disproportionately higher rates than settlers. The intersections of trauma, sexuality, and state- sanctioned violence, and their impact on Indigenous communities, must be named. I’m thinking of Joyce Echaquan, a 37-year-old Canadian Indigenous woman, and mother of seven, who died on September 28, 2020 after being ignored by doctors and nurses at a hospital in Quebec. Echaquan started a Facebook livestream, capturing nurses accusing her of being on drugs and telling her that she was would be better off dead. Echaquan’s death makes it all too evident that medicalized racism, with its investment in pathologization, is alive and well. It is our job, as settlers on this land, to challenge the ways in which this history continues to be upheld today.

iv Acknowledgments

I could not have produced this dissertation without all of the intimacies I have fostered over the years. Long before I had the concept of hysterical intimacies, I was practicing these queer, crip forms of relationality with my two dearest friends, Natalie and Variya. Through our intimacies, I realized that I could show up with all of my trauma, and, much later, my sickness, and still be loved and cared for. For that I’m endlessly grateful.

To my PhD besties, Cristina and Katherine, thank you for encouraging me to be true to myself and my research no matter what, and for reading many drafts of the chapters here – and those that didn’t make it in. Thank you to my queer writing group pals, who said yes when I asked to form a little care web where we’d meet each week, share our goals and our frustrations, and then silently work together over Zoom: Lex, Morgan, Jess, and Tyler. Seeing your faces on the screen each week made these revisions possible.

To my partner David, who affirmed me when I needed to step away from this project and who celebrated me when I stepped back in. It’s not easy to cohabitate with someone in the throes of finishing their dissertation. Thank you for feeding me, nourishing me, and holding me as I cried and wondered if I’d see this through to completion. And to my partner Jaime, who I met through the world of Instagram, for showing me just how much intimacy can be built and fostered online, in the midst of a global pandemic. You bring such soft hysterical queer crip magic into my life. Building a garden with you is such a gift.

Thank you to my committee, who guided me towards creating a dissertation that is so much more meaningful than I’d imagined possible: my supervisor, Dana Seitler, who was with me the whole way through and who stepped in to take over supervision as this project was nearing completion; to Denise Cruz, who asked to remain a part of this project even after heading to NYC to take a position at Columbia; and to Naomi Morgenstern for enthusiastically joining us much, much later in the game. I’ve spent a lot of my time in academia feeling like a weirdo – but each step of the way, you celebrated me and this interdisciplinary, autotheoretical project. And to Alison Kafer, my external reviewer, and Andrea Charise, my internal reviewer: thank you for engaging with my work and seeing me in my writing. Your feedback has been invaluable.

v And finally, this project wouldn’t be what it is without my hype squad of humans on Instagram. You made me believe that academic work could mean something to those outside of academia’s walls. You let me show up, in all of my messiness as the chronically ill, trauma BB that I am. Through your support, I saw just how radical it is to foster intimacy and community on the internet. Thank you for providing me with examples of the kinds of care that strangers can foster with one another. It is truly life-changing and life-sustaining.

vi For Ida Bauer, Louise Augustine Gleizes, and all of the other hysterics of the past. And to all of the sick babes and trauma BBs now and to come. Together, we can build something so much more beautiful than what we’ve been given.

vii Table of Contents

Introduction: Touch Me, I’m Sick 1

• On Sickness 1 • Another Sick Girl; or, a Note on Methodology 5 • A Map Through Sickness and Trauma 9 • A Note on Taking Care 13 • A Final Thought 13

Chapter 1: Hysterical Intimacies | Sick Theories 18

• Dora: The Original Sick Girl 18 • Hysterical Intimacies 23 • Sick Theories 29 • Towards a Radical Politics of Care 36

Chapter 2: Pregnant, Hysterical, Sick: The Teen Pregnancy Endemic 52

• In the Wake of the COVID-19 Pandemic 52 • The Endemic of Sick Mothers 57 • National Narratives 63 • Sick Mothers; Hysterical Intimacies 70 • Webs of Care 81

Chapter 3: Ambivalent Desires: Ugly Sex & the Intimacy to Come 96

• Ambivalent Confessions 96 • Feminist Sex & the Problem of Ambivalence 101 • Ugly Sex & Anti-Hystericalism 105 I. The Marie Calloway Problem 111 II. Getting Off on the Sludge 120 • Intimacy to Come 125

Chapter 4: Hysteria’s Ghosts: Chronic Illness & Collective Care 135

• A Scene from the Sick Bed 135 • Invisible Illness & #HospitalGlam 138 • Sick Girls, Hysterical Women 147 • Sick Women, Blood Sisters 154

Coda: Soft Future | Future Templates; or, Femme4Femme Intimacy as an Act of 179 World Building

Works Consulted 192

Copyright Acknowledgments 221

viii List of Figures

Fig. 1 Margeaux Feldman, “Sick Girl Selfie.” 137

Fig. 2 Karolyn Gehrig, “What is #HospitalGlam?” 140

Fig. 3 Karolyn Gehrig, “I continue to practice #HospitalGlam.” 147

Fig. 4 Désiré Magloire Bourneville and Paul Regnard, Plate XXIV. Hystéro-Èpilepsie: Contracture, 1878, collotypes with letterpress captions. 147

Fig. 5 Karolyn Gehrig, “#HospitalGlam: Healthcare is a luxury good.” 148

Fig. 6 Désiré Magloire Bourneville and Paul Regnard, Plate XXIV. Attitudes Passionelles: Hallecinations De L’Ouie, 1878, collotypes with letterpress captions. 148

Fig. 7 Esmé Weijun Wang, “Today I was flattened by fatigue and pain again.” 169

Fig. 8 Esmé Weijun Wang, “My apologies for the deluge of IV-room selfies.” 170

ix 1

Introduction Touch Me, I’m Sick

On Sickness

On April 3, 2019, Lena Dunham, the star and creator of the HBO television series Girls, shared a photo of her new tattoo on Instagram. Emblazoned on the back of her neck is the word “sick” spelled out in rope. Underneath the photo, Dunham offered the following caption: “Sometimes the thing you’re most scared of being called is the best thing you can call yourself. Thank you @havenstudiobk for labeling me... and to my sisters in this dizzying but starry slog — I am lasso’d to you!”1 Dunham has been living with endometriosis, a chronic condition in which the uterine tissue grows on other organs within the body, causing crushing pain. For Dunham, this diagnosis has resulted in five surgeries between 2015 and 2018, including the removal of her cervix and uterus.2 Dunham’s tattoo asks us to push through our discomfort and touch the sick body: “to my sisters in this dizzying but starry slog — I am lasso’d to you!” This call to touch and be in touch with the sick woman’s body is especially poignant coming from Dunham, whose desirability has been so often called into called into question by viewers of the television series Girls, itself the site of much vitriol since it debuted on HBO in 2012.

Spanning six seasons, Girls follows the lives of four twenty-something best friends living in New York City. Hannah Horvath, played by Dunham, is the show’s protagonist, an aspiring writer who might easily be one of the most disliked women in television history.3 Hannah is selfish and self-absorbed, claiming to be the “voice of her generation” in the show’s first episode. Hannah was so disliked by audiences that she was pitted against Hannibal Lecter in the Atlantic’s contest to find the most terrible character on television. Spoiler: despite the sustained dislike of Hannah, critics did decide that Hannibal is the more terrible of the two.4

For those unfamiliar with the show, it’s unusual for an episode of Girls to not include Hannah in some state of undress. If, for Dunham, her consistent nudity is “a realistic expression of what it is to be alive,” for critics her character seems to be “naked at random times for no reason.”5 Challenging this criticism, Liz Miller at IndieWire offers a reparative reading of Dunham’s nakedness, claiming that Dunham uses her body “as a way of reminding us that everyone is sometimes awful, sometimes messy. Sometimes naked.” This embrace of messiness and 2 awfulness is amplified by the sexual acts that Hannah engages in with her boyfriend Adam. In the second episode of the series, poignantly titled “Vagina Panic,” we find Hannah and Adam having sex in his apartment. Adam wants Hannah to play along with a sexual fantasy: Hannah is an eleven-year old prostitute with a Cabbage Patch Kids lunch box. Hannah reluctantly plays along until Adam pulls out, rips off his condom, and comes on Hannah’s chest. It would be all too easy to pathologize this sexual encounter between Hannah and Adam. Adam is an adult man expressing a pedophilic desire and Hannah is the woman who plays along and is thus complicit in enacting this fantasy. But it is precisely this kind of reading that I want us to resist. This dissertation argues that to read certain desires as healthy and others as sick effectively erases the way ambivalence is a constitutive feature of desire. And, it’s also a scapegoat. In blaming Hannah for playing along, we refuse to acknowledge the ways that our desires are shaped by the world that we live in. What I argue, then, is that Dunham’s fear of being labelled sick, and her reclaiming of that label through her tattoo, is inextricably linked to the ways in which her desires, and the desires of other young women, have been and continue to be pathologized. In other words, the associative chain between negative cultural reactions of Dunham as a sick body and her character, Hannah, as participating in sick desires lays bare exactly how entangled women’s bodies are in the mutually informing discourses of disease and sexuality. By contrast, Dunham’s reclaiming of the term asks that we reconsider what a sick body can mean.

Historically, we’ve done an excellent job romanticizing illness: the consumptive woman, on her deathbed, the tortured artist with some unnamed illness who seeks refuge at a sanatorium.6 Claiming sickness, however, conveys a very different set of connotations. In the call for papers for the conference I organized, Sick Theories: A Trans-Disciplinary Conference on Sickness and Sexuality, my co-organizer Lauren Fournier and I described the difference between sick and ill as follows: “As a word, illness operates to make the realities of sickness more palatable for the neoliberal, capitalist world that depends upon the oppression of the sick body and labels it as unproductive. Sickness demarcates the messiness, ugliness, and inexplicable nature of disease, bringing us back to the original meaning of disease as dis-ease.” As I’ll go on to demonstrate throughout this dissertation, this dis-ease comes from living in a world rife with systemic oppression. While both labels come with their own problematic histories, the difference between who is labelled ill and who is labelled sick often depends on the forms of privilege or oppression one inhabits. 3

Rather than refute the harms of this distinction, Johanna Hedva’s essay “Sick Woman Theory” makes a claim to sickness as an identity. Hedva writes: “Sick Woman Theory is for those who are faced with their vulnerability and unbearable fragility, every day, and so have to fight for their experience to be not only honored, but first made visible. For those who, in Audre Lorde’s words, were never meant to survive: because this world was built against their survival” (Section 4). Hedva elaborates on what this practice of identification entails, which I’d like to quote at length:

The Sick Woman is an identity and body that can belong to anyone denied the privileged existence – or the cruelly optimistic promise of such an existence – of the white, straight, healthy, neurotypical, upper and middle-class, cis- and able-bodied man who makes his home in a wealthy country, has never not had health insurance, and whose importance to society is everywhere recognized and made explicit by that society; whose importance and care dominates that society, at the expense of everyone else. The Sick Woman is anyone who does not have this guarantee of care. The Sick Woman is told that, to this society, her care, even her survival, does not matter. The Sick Woman is all of the “dysfunctional,” “dangerous” and “in danger,” “badly behaved,” “crazy,” “incurable,” “traumatized,” “disordered,” “diseased,” “chronic,” “uninsurable,” “wretched,” “undesirable” and altogether “dysfunctional” bodies belonging to women, people of color, poor, ill, neuro- atypical, differently abled, queer, trans, and genderfluid people, who have been historically pathologized, hospitalized, institutionalized, brutalized, rendered “unmanageable,” and therefore made culturally illegitimate and politically invisible. (Section 5)

As Hedva describes, it is not just that those who are “sick” are pathologized. Those who are sick are seen as undeserving of a cure; whose symptoms are read as illegible; who are, in fact, kept sick so that the capitalist ableist world can continue to perpetuate the myth of the individual who’s able to pick himself up by the bootstraps. Anyone else who fails to do this is abandoned, labelled sick, hysterical, incurable, and undeserving of care.

There is a lengthy history of labeling girls, women, and femmes – and their desires – as sick. From the treatment of hysterics by Jean-Martin Charcot and Sigmund Freud in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the continued imprisonment of sex workers, the sexuality of girls, 4 women, and femmes is all too often framed as in need of containment by state bodies. It is this history that I work to trace in “Touch Me, I’m Sick.” I demonstrate how, despite this pathologization, we can locate an equally powerfully set of narratives in which those who are labelled as sick refuse to distance themselves from the figure of the hysteric, a refusal evidenced in their artistic production, social media presence, and other textual expressions. Just as Dunham permanently marks her body with the word sick, reclaiming this word as her “best thing,” the cultural practices of the girls, women, and femmes I discuss throughout my dissertation embrace the figure of the sick girl in all of her messiness.7 By following the hysteric’s call to accept and revel in the ambivalent nature of desire, they push back against pathologization and imagine sick and queer modes of care that I refer to as “hysterical intimacies.”

Tracking the intersecting, mutually constitutive discourses of disease, femininity, and desire entails an expansive look at the various fictions, media forms, and cultural narratives that respond to and inform them. In the first chapter, I place the contemporary pathologization of women’s bodies and desires within the history of hysteria. I begin with Freud and Charcot’s studies of hysteria at the beginning of the twentieth century and end with medical and cultural attitudes toward Chronic Fatigue Syndrome in our contemporary moment, a sickness by and large attributed, often pejoratively, to women. At the chapter’s end, I unpack the need for what I call “sick theories,” which, as Hedva argues, are necessary to think the sick woman’s body differently. Part of the aim of this chapter is also to respond to the lack of discussion of chronic illness within disability studies, by theorizing sickness as marking that which is endemic, chronic, and supposedly pathological.8

Up until now, with a few notable exceptions, disability studies has focused its attention on those with visible disabilities and the “healthy disabled” to borrow Susan Wendell’s term.9 Disability studies has worked hard – and rightly so – to untether itself from the violent legacy of labeling disabled bodies as sick and in need of a cure. At the same time, more work is needed to theorize various forms of incapacity and debility and their vicissitudes, including those of us living with chronic illness and/or trauma. I am thus inspired by the work of those in the disability justice movement, whose radical politics emphasizes the necessity of interdependence in our quest to dismantle the ableist world we live in. These forms of interdependence are sick and hysterical, 5 messy and nuanced, and they offer us new avenues for caring for each other in a world that seeks to isolate, debilitate, and often kill the sick body.

In this context, “Touch Me, I’m Sick” draws on the fields of disability studies, psychoanalysis, affect theory, queer theory, critical race studies, feminist theory, and cultural studies in order to unpack the ways in which the desires of girls, women, and femmes continue to be pathologized and labelled as sick. After laying out the theoretical groundwork for my dissertation in Chapter 1, I turn to three case studies, each with its own sick girl. In Chapter 2, I look at the pregnant Black teenager living in the American South as depicted in television, ad campaigns, and fiction in order to underscore how the racialized Black young girl’s body is perceived as always already sick. In Chapter 3, I look at a series of stories written by young women who narrate scenes of what I call “ugly sex” with awful men (that is, consensual sex in excess of and often entirely distinct from romanticized notions of sexual encounter). In Chapter 4, I turn our attention to chronically ill women and their strategies of self-representation and community care. Finally, in the coda, I shift the focus to femmes, who have always been, and continue to be, at the forefront of the movement to depathologize so-called non-normative sexuality.

The pathologization of women’s bodies as sick has real consequences in terms of the care received when they actually are: the lack of services and financial supports that keep teen moms of colour living below the poverty line; the trauma and isolation that comes from being slut- shamed for having sex that is far from empowering; and the escalation of life-threatening chronic illnesses. I argue throughout this dissertation that a cultural shift is necessary for the psychic and physical survival of girls, women, and femmes – one that can in part be located in the practices, strategies of redefinition, and sick theories explored herein.

Another Sick Girl; or, a Note on Methodology

It is important to name the fact that I’m an academic and an activist, and I live with complex trauma and chronic pain. In fact, this dissertation exists precisely because of these subject positions. In the long tradition of scholarship that has examined the forms knowledge takes beyond traditional academic writing, I’d like to offer an anecdote.10 In our co-authored article, “Towards a Femme Pedagogy, or Making Space for Trauma in the Classroom,” Morgan Bimm and I argue that, “the anecdote offers a roadmap for transforming theory into practice.” In 6 offering this anecdote, I’d like to illuminate my methodology, in which practice becomes theory and theory becomes practice.

During my thirty-first year I got sick, and then I stayed sick. When I realized that something might be wrong, I began searching for books that could help me figure out why my body was turning against me. I also went to see my doctor and naturopath. But neither had much of a sense of what was wrong. First it was a spike in my anxiety levels, making it difficult to get out of bed in the morning. Then I contracted a urinary tract infection, which led to a kidney infection. After that, I had a viral sinus infection lasted three months. Finally: stomach flu. Six months later, after this relentless string of viruses, I was utterly exhausted. I got winded making dinner. I slept for fourteen hours a night and napped throughout the day. Then, after two glorious weeks of passable good health, my body started to ache. The kind of aches you get when you’re sick, except there was no sneezing, coughing, or other symptoms. It felt like I’d decided to do the most intense gym workout of my life after a yearlong hiatus, while also coming down with the season’s worst flu virus. There were some primary suspects, including anemia and diabetes. But eventually both were ruled out. It’s hard to adequately describe my ambivalence at this news: one part of me was happy that I wouldn’t be dependent on insulin for the rest of my life. And the other part of me was sad that we didn’t have a concrete diagnosis because, if it wasn’t diabetes, then we still didn’t have a culprit. Whatever was making me sick was a fugitive evading capture.

I couldn’t write and I could barely think due to the overwhelming brain fog that comes with chronic pain. But I could still read, and so, like any good graduate student, I took things into my own hands. I began to look for books about autoimmune diseases and chronic illness. I’m a literature student critical of the medical-industrial complex, so the books I gravitated towards weren’t those written by medical health professionals or other experts. I read poems about being sick, essays about the links between chronic pain and trauma, novels about autoimmune diseases with characters that are trying to solve the mystery of a body that has turned against itself. Like Anne Elizabeth Moore, the author of Body Horror, I was diagnosing myself by way of literature.

It wasn’t just that I wanted to solve the mystery of my body. I wanted to feel less alone. “Who else is sick?” I wondered. “Who else feels trapped by their body?” Given that sickness is something kept out of sight, relegated to the home or the hospital, I knew that it might be hard to 7 find such stories. But I was determined to build a genealogy. I wanted to find the many sick mothers of my heart.11 Amongst all of the mothers that I discovered during my reading, I found myself returning most often to Freud’s hysterical women—the originary sick girls.

My return to Freud’s hysterics wasn’t accidental. Another sick mother helped me get there. In her poetry collection Tender Points, Amy Berkowitz tells the reader how, “As I read more about the history of invisible illness, I’m surprised and amused to diagnose myself with hysteria” (37). But of course, hysteria wasn’t her official diagnosis. Berkowitz has fibromyalgia and she recalls her relief upon receiving a diagnosis, akin to my own desire for an answer. But she also notes: “I know the true name of this disease—My Body Is Haunted by a Certain Trauma—so I don’t care what other name it has, so long as it has one. Something to point to. Something to call it” (29). I read her words and am reminded of Freud’s famous proclamation in Studies on Hysteria, that “hysterics suffer for the most part from reminiscences” (11). Hysterics, in other words, are haunted by a certain trauma. I too would receive a fibromyalgia diagnosis and the relationship between my chronic pain and complex trauma would begin to make sense.

Fibromyalgia begins with the sympathetic nervous system, otherwise known as the “fight-or- flight response.” For most people, the fight-or-flight response comes into action when faced with a real danger and the frontal cortex (or the “adult brain” as its colloquially called) needs to know how to respond. Swerving to avoid a car accident? That’s the flight response. Shooting when shot at? That’s the fight response. Here’s what should happen: your adult brain sends a signal to your sympathetic nervous system: “There’s danger! I need you to help me out!” And the SNS assesses the situation and chooses the appropriate response. Once the danger has been avoided, the SNS sends a signal to the adult brain that says, “Danger’s over!” And you begin to relax. For those of who have experienced trauma, you may find that the signals don’t always work as they should. The SNS doesn’t understand that the danger is over. And so it stays on alert in order to protect you, thereby inhibiting deep sleep. This lack of sleep sets off a chain reaction that prevents adequate growth hormone release, which interferes with muscle tissue repair and leads to muscle pain. As a response to this pain, muscles and their surrounding connective tissues are chronically tightened to respond to danger and become painful. The nervous system becomes overwhelmed and hyper-reactive to pain. 8

It is no coincidence that at the same time as I was searching for a diagnosis to explain my chronic pain, I received another: complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD).12 Not one diagnosis, but two. And even though I wanted to know what was going wrong with my body, in repeating this diagnostic language here, it feels imperative to name my own ambivalent relationship to Western psychiatric models in which diagnosis is the only way to receive both legitimacy and financial support from health insurance and government disability programs. Many thus choose to reject the labels of PTSD or C-PTSD (the latter has yet to be recognised by the DSM-V) due to the ways in which the biopsychiatric model has oppressed those living with mental health issues, reducing their experiences to brain chemistry, while failing to address the systemic issues that dramatically impact one’s mental health and cause trauma.13 It is for these reasons that I’d like to follow Bonnie Burstow’s definition of trauma as “not a disorder but a reaction to a kind of wound” (1302) and Renee Linklater’s definition in Decolonizing Trauma Work: “trauma is a person’s reaction or response to an injury” (22). Alongside these thinkers, I take issue with the ways in which the diagnosis of PTSD fails to acknowledge the systemic issues that cause trauma in the first place, and places the onus of healing on the individual, thus ignoring the importance of community. In other words, my main issue with much of the work on trauma – academic and non-academic – is that it fails to acknowledge the politics of trauma and offers no routes forward for healing beyond the specific, individual impact of trauma. In my reading about trauma and chronic illness, I quickly came to see that trauma and sickness are systemic issues. They are endemic to our contemporary moment.

We need a more capacious definition of trauma that moves beyond the argument that trauma is an individual problem in need of treatment. My theoretical engagement with trauma is deeply informed by my personal trauma work and by Staci K. Haines’s model of generative somatics. In her book The Politics of Trauma, Haines describes somatics as “a holistic methodology and theory of change,” that understands “both the individual and collective as a combination of biological, evolutionary, emotional, and psychological aspects, shaped by social and historical norms, and adaptive to a wide array of both resilient and oppressive forces” (18-19). Rejecting the Westernized investment in the mind-body dualism, somatics, which comes from the Greek root soma, meaning “the living organism in its wholeness” (19), Haines reminds us that our brains live within our bodies and thus human beings are “integrated mind, body, spirit, and 9 social, relational beings” (19). Within this framework, trauma is not an individual pathology to be cured. Haines explains:

While we may have traumatic experiences that are very personal, and may live alone with them for years, traumas such as child sexual abuse, intimate partner violence, harassment, and police violence reveal themselves to be systemic due to their sheer numbers and spread across regions. Violations that occur frequently, and across many communities, show us that there is something happening in the social and economic fabric that actually supports, or allows for, their occurrence. (84)

This dissertation is, thus, an attempt to address the places where our social fabric has broken down; and, perhaps more importantly, to point us towards a world without systemic oppression – a lofty goal, I know, but one that I feel ethically called to pursue, alongside all of the other traumatized and chronically ill femmes who came before me.

A Map Through Sickness & Trauma

In Chapter One, I unravel the theoretical underpinnings of this dissertation: sick theories and hysterical intimacies. Beginning with an analysis of the original sick girl, Sigmund Freud’s Dora, I demonstrate how Freud’s analysis and its failings laid the groundwork for current understandings of the relationship between trauma and chronic illness. I then look at the ways in which teen girls revive and reclaim the figure of the hysteric in order to imagine hysterical intimacies between and amongst them. Hysterical intimacies, I argue, are the queer, crip modes of caring for ourselves and others that resist and outright challenge the ableist pathologizing logics of cisheteronormativity.

It perhaps goes without saying that intimacy takes different shapes and forms, and changes depending on the context or form of relation.14 Each chapter in the dissertation looks at a different mode of relationality, and therefore each instance of intimacy looks different than the last. In Chapter Two, I take up Jesmyn Ward’s novel Salvage the Bones (2011) in order to explore the intimacy between humans and nonhumans, between a real girl, a mythic woman, and a force of nature, between a pregnant teenage girl and her chosen and not chosen family. Chapter Three looks at the sexual encounters between relative strangers in the autofictional works of 10

Marie Calloway and Catherine Fatima. Chapter four focuses on the friendships created through the act of posting a selfie on Instagram, an intimacy cultivated without ever meeting “IRL.” In the coda, I look at what kinds of intimacy can be fostered between strangers in the midst of a global pandemic. While each is different in their own ways, they all require the same wager: will you love me and care for me if I reveal my excess? Will you touch me if I’m sick?

These questions require a theorization of sickness, what I’ve called “sick theories”: a term I use to bring discussions of hysteria, chronic illness, trauma into dialogue with the field of disability studies and the disability justice movement. In so doing, I hope to address the relative absence of trauma and chronic illness within disability studies, arguing for an expansion of that field vis-à- vis sick theories. Each chapter in this dissertation thus focuses on a different sick girl and the hysterical intimacies she works to create.

In Chapter 2, “Pregnant, Hysterical, Sick: the Teen Pregnancy Endemic,” the sick girl is the Black teen mom in the American South. I’m particularly interested in how the experience of teen pregnancy is reflected in cultural and political narratives, which tend to frame teen pregnancy as a spectacle, a tragedy, and/or a sickness – all in service of perpetuating the myth of the “teen pregnancy epidemic.” The story of the teen pregnancy epidemic works to cover over how the very notion of teen pregnancy is created and perpetuated by state-sanctioned forms of paternalism and part of the ongoing history of medicalized racism and ableism. I thus reject the state’s claim that the pregnant teen – and the Black teen girl in particular – is sick and in need of a cure.

To develop these claims, I turn to a seemingly disparate archive of materials: interviews I conducted with women at the forefront of teen pregnancy prevention work in Mississippi and Louisiana (states with some of the highest rates of teen pregnancy); the MTV series Teen Mom: Young and Pregnant; and Ward’s novel Salvage the Bones. Placing cultural, political, educational, and literary objects into conversation, I demonstrate how the tragedies that attach themselves to teen moms of colour do not come from the birth of their children. Rather, the inability for the teen mom to thrive is supported by the state’s refusal to implement comprehensive sex education, access to abortion and contraception, and the lack of economic opportunities. 11

After refuting the framing of teen pregnancy as a sickness in need of a cure, I turn to Ward’s novel to see how a young Black pregnant girl named Esch refuses the pathologizing logic of the epidemic, which works to isolate teen mothers and deny them of the structural care they need. Recognizing that she has no choice but to have her baby, Esch builds a support network filled with sick and unruly mothers that cross species lines. Her brother’s pit bull China, the mythical figure of Medea, and the oncoming Hurricane Katrina, could all easily be labelled “hysterical.” And it is with and through these hysterical mothers that Esch reimagines the forms that communal care can take by crafting hysterical intimacies.

In Chapter 3, “Ambivalent Desires: Ugly Sex & the Intimacy to Come,” I turn my attention to the pathologization of the desires of girls and women. I look at the critical reception of autofictional works written by young women and in particular on Marie Calloway’s what purpose did i serve in your life? (2013) and Catherine Fatima’s Sludge Utopia (2018). Focusing on what I call “ugly sex” (sex that gives you pleasure at the same time as it repulses you), I claim that instead of focusing on why women choose to sleep with awful men – a question that can be answered quite simply: #patriarchy – we need to shift our focus to a different question: Why are we so quick to pathologize the woman who has ugly sex and what does such a reading foreclose?

As I’ll show, any desire for intimacy that happens outside of or in antagonism to cisheteronormativity, with its love for marriage and sex as a means for procreation only, has been and continues to be characterized as sick, in so much as it is deviant, perverted, or non- normative – and positioned as in need of a cure. Thus, I place these texts into conversation with other supposedly perverse forms of sex, including BDSM and race play, to demonstrate how these “sick” forms of intimacy work to reject the logic of the cure that was forced upon hysterical girls in the past. I propose that we read Fatima and Calloway’s flat affective descriptions of these ugly sexual encounters as their investment in what I call “anti- hystericalism”: a political practice that characterizes how these authors generate fiction that makes multiple interventions in existing gendered narratives of sexual pathology by prioritizing the role that ambivalence plays in shaping our desires.

Calloway and Fatima acknowledge that ugly sex can enable us to turn away from the logic of pathologization attached to non-normative or ambivalent sexual desires. What these texts offer 12 instead is a form of hysterical intimacy that revels in the fleeting sexual encounter, rejecting altogether the heteronormative valorization of romantic long-term monogamous partnerships. While cisheteronormativity would have us believe that deep intimacy is only possible through long-term relationships, these texts demonstrate how it’s all too common for our most intimate others to reject and/or pathologize our ambivalent desires. Hysterical intimacies take shape as sexual encounters that do not depend on emotional connection in order to be meaningful.

In Chapter 4, “Hysteria’s Ghosts: Chronic Illness & the Sick Girl Selfie,” I turn to today’s sick girl: the woman living with autoimmune diseases and chronic illnesses. I analyze the treatment – or lack thereof – of chronic illnesses through the recent rise in chronic illness memoirs and writing on autoimmunity and women’s pain. I spend an extended period of time discussing the links between trauma and chronic illness in order to highlight the endemic nature of both within the lives of girls and women. In order to do so, I place Porochista Khakpour’s Sick: A Memoir and Esmé Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays into conversation with the sick- girl selfies they post on Instagram. I argue that these images are haunted by the photographs of hysterics taken at the Salpêtrière Hospital in the nineteenth century and provide a history of the hysterics treated by Jean-Martin Charcot. What we see when comparing these photographs is the ways in which trauma makes itself known in and through the body.

Through and within Khakpour and Wang’s writing and selfies, hysterical intimacies are born. Beyond their own friendship, the sick bodies of Khakpour and Wang reach out to others, in real life or online, and ask to be seen and cared for. In making the chronically ill self visible via the sick-girl selfie, Wang and Khakpour work to foster connections with others and they point us towards an ethics of care, in which the sick woman is no longer the site of pathology – but, rather, the site of potentiality.

Finally, in the coda of this dissertation, “Soft Future | Future Templates; or, Femme4Femme Intimacy as an Act of World Building,” I offer some personal scenes of intimacy amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. These scenes between myself and another femme demonstrate the ways in which femmes are the ultimate dreamers of care and intimacy. As Morgan Bimm and I have argued elsewhere, being femme is a resistive practice and embodied theory that centres care and holds space for trauma and is thus valuable as an epistemic tool, a way of framing our 13 understanding of relationality.15 Femme asks us to consider that softness and sadness exist in all of us, asks us to consider a world in which we name those hurts and use them in our journey forward, rather than resolve, repress, or leave them in the past entirely. If femme means resisting the destruction of the softest parts of ourselves in the name of survival, then surely a femme intimacy works to incorporate those vulnerabilities and traumas into our relationships with others.

In the wake of so many femme deaths – both suicides and homicides – I want to imagine femme futures. I need to imagine femme futures. We all do. Recognizing the ways in which so many femmes live with trauma, this coda is an invitation to imagine the future that femme intimacies can make possible by holding space for and caring for our traumas with softness.

A Note on Taking Care

This dissertation engages explicitly with a variety of different forms of trauma. In each chapter I discuss sexual assault and rape. In addition, I’d like to flag the following: in Chapter 2, I provide a history of medicalized racism, which includes forced sterilization and medical experimentation on Black women; in Chapter 3, I discuss the feminist porn debates, BDSM, and race play pornography; in Chapter 4, I return to the history of medicalized racism and misogyny, and engage with the sexual trauma histories of other hysterics; finally, in the coda I refer to the COVID-19 pandemic, rape, sexual assault, and substance use/abuse. In offering this content note, I wish to encourage those reading to take care. I don’t believe that ideas are ever more important than one’s emotional and psychic well being. In moving towards the femme future that I propose in the coda, it’s important to ask ourselves, “What’s the softest thing I can do right now?” I hope this question can guide you as you move through “Touch Me, I’m Sick.”

A Final Thought

If there’s anything that I hope you take away from this writing, it’s this: if trauma is a systemic issue, and I believe that it is, then it is our collective responsibility to address the roots of harm – colonialism, racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism – not only to heal ourselves, but to heal the world we live in. This change comes little by little.16 We change the world we live in by crafting new, radical forms of intimacy that resist the pathologizing logics of 14 systemic oppression. These new forms, what I’ve called hysterical intimacies, enable us to show up in the world with all of our trauma and sickness, and imagine better worlds to come.

15

Chapter Notes

1 www.instagram.com/p/Bvx7k-GA46J/

2 See also Frey.

3 With articles titled “Why We Hate Hannah Horvath” and “Hannah Horvath, Why Do We (Still) Hate Thee So?” you don’t have to look hard to find articles criticizing Hannah’s character. Even Allison P. Davis, who offers one of the more redemptive readings of Hannah’s character, can’t help but begin her article by proclaiming: “I hate Hannah Horvath. Everyone hates Hannah; hating Hannah is one of the major themes of Girls.” See also: Bentley; VanArendonk; and Whitney.

4 “#ActualWorst, Round Two: Hannah Horvath vs. Hannibal Lecter.” Much like Hannah, critics aren’t huge fans of Dunham either. Whether its offhandedly wishing that she’d had an abortion, accusing NFL player Odell Beckham Jr. of not speaking to her during the MET Gala because she was wearing a bowtie, or comparing reading negative comments online to experiencing domestic abuse, Dunham has continually been called out for her white feminism. In 2018, Dunham earned the title of “white feminist nightmare” after admitting that she lied in order to discredit actress Aurora Perrineau who’d accused Dunham’s friend and co-worker of sexual assault.

5 This comment came from Tim Molloy of The Wrap, who posed the first question to Dunham at a panel at the Television Critics Association. Unsurprisingly, Molloy’s question wasn’t a question as much as a remark: “I don’t get the purpose of all the nudity on the show. By you particularly. I feel like I’m walking into a trap where you say no one complains about the nudity on ‘Game of Thrones,’ but I get why they’re doing it. They’re doing it to be salacious. To titillate people. And your character is often naked at random times for no reason.” Cf. Amanda Hess’s article “Television Critic Doesn’t “Get” Why Lena Dunham Is Naked All the Time.”

6 Cf. Carolyn A. Day’s Consumptive Chic: A History of Beauty, Fashion, and Disease: “Tuberculosis and its accompanying symptoms were construed as the physical manifestation of an inner passion and drive. It was the outward sign of genius and fervour that literally lit the individual, providing the pallid cheek with a glow” (48); Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre 16

English’s Complaints and Disorders: The Sexual Politics of Sickness: “Literature aimed at female readers lingered on the romantic pathos of illness and death…It was acceptable, even fashionable, to retire to bed with ‘sick headaches,’ ‘nerves,’ and a host of other mysterious ailments” (51); Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor: “The most striking similarity between the myths of TB and cancer is that both are, or were, understood as diseases of passion. Fever in TB was a sign of an inward burning: the tubercular is someone ‘consumed’ by ardor” (20).

7 I can’t help but to recall the moment in Toni Morrison’s Beloved where Paul D. tells Sethe: “‘You your best thing, Sethe. You are.’ His holding fingers are holding hers” (322). That Sethe is sick at this moment, immobilized by her grief, makes this proclamation all the more moving.

8 Following Jasbir Puar, I use the word endemic as both noun and adjective (xvi-xvii). An endemic is that which is belonging or native to a particular country or people; or a characteristic of or prevalent in a particular area. And endemic can also be used as a noun in the sense that it is that which is “a constant presence in a specific location” (Intermountain Healthcare).

9 Cf. Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century ed. Alice Wong.

10 The anecdote is a common thread throughout feminist and queer theory’s history, as well as in disability studies; from Jane Gallop’s Anecdotal Theory to Donna Haraway’s situated knowledges to Ann Cvekovitch’s writing on depression, the proven usefulness of anecdotes is everywhere.

11 This phrase is inspired by what Maggie Nelson refers to as “the many gendered mothers of my heart” in her book The Argonauts (57). But this term doesn’t belong to Nelson. She notes how she is borrowing the term from Dana Ward’s poem “A Kentucky of Mothers”: “O god save all the many gendered-mothers of my heart, & all the other mothers, who do not need god or savior.” Nelson, like Ward, wants us to read the word “mother” capaciously. It is not just the familial mother that they’re talking about; nor is the mother necessarily a woman. For Nelson, “the many gendered mothers” of her heart includes the artists and theorists and philosophers and educators who have, whether intentionally or unintentionally, taught her something. 17

12 The American Psychological Association defines trauma as “an emotional response to a terrible event like an accident, rape or natural disaster. Immediately after the event, shock and denial are typical. Longer-term reactions include unpredictable emotions, flashbacks, strained relationships and even physical symptoms like headaches or nausea.” For Susan Brison, “a traumatic event is one in which a person feels utterly helpless in the face of a force that is perceived to be life-threatening” (39). In addition to the sources listed by the APA, trauma can come from events that are ongoing: living in poverty and chronically chaotic housing and financial resources; witnessing or experiencing community violence; having a family member incarcerated; or being subject to a life-threatening health situation. For an event to be traumatic (rather than distressing or upsetting), there has to be a perceived threat to one’s bodily autonomy. As Peter Levine succinctly articulates it: ‘While it is true that all traumatic events are stressful, not all stressful events are traumatic” (7). Along similar lines, Faith G. Harper explains: “Of course not every trauma we experience causes a trauma response. A trauma response happens when our traumatic experience goes unresolved” (24).

13 See also: Bossewitch; Green and Ubozoh; and Sharfstein.

14 Queer theory has taken up intimacy as one of its core concerns and so it feels impossible to provide a full synopsis of that archive. But here are some key texts that have influenced my own thinking: David Eng’s The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy; Heather Love’s Feeling Backwards: Loss and the Politics of Queer History; Maggie Nelson’s work of autotheory, The Argonauts.

15 See Morgan Bimm and Margeaux Feldman, “Towards a Femme Pedagogy, or Making Space for Trauma in the Classroom.”

16 Am here inspired by adrienne maree brown’s discussion of micro and macro movements in her book Emergent Strategy. 18

Chapter 1 Hysterical Intimacies | Sick Theories

Dora: The Original Sick Girl

In the introduction to Freud’s Dora, Philip Rieff describes Dora’s case history as follows: “The sick daughter has a sick father, who has a sick mistress, who has a sick husband, who proposes himself to the sick daughter as her lover” (x). The sickness referenced here is both literal and metaphorical: the father is sick with tuberculosis and syphilis and the mother suffers from abdominal pains. But Rieff also invokes sickness in another sense, of denoting that which is morally repugnant. Mistresses and lovers corrupt the scene just as much as physical ailments do. Sickness is never neutral.

In Freud’s case study, we’re taken back to 1898, the year in which a family friend propositions the sixteen-year old girl in front of the lake near her family’s summer resort. This young girl will become known as Dora in Freud’s most famous case study of hysteria. Dora’s father calls upon Freud to determine why Dora can’t stop coughing and losing her voice. Dora has been “a source of heavy trials for her parents,” Freud remarks, with her “low spirits and an alteration in her character” (16). Freud believes that Dora needs psychological treatment for these physical symptoms, but the attack passes and Dora’s family believes that all is well again. The following year, however, Dora’s sick again, this time with a “feverish disorder which was diagnosed at the time as appendicitis” (16). It’s not until the following year that Dora’s symptoms return – after an attack that leads to a loss of consciousness (17) – and she becomes Freud’s patient.

Dora displays all of the characteristics of hysteria: a psychic trauma, a conflict of affects, and a disturbance in the sphere of sexuality (18). At first Freud assumes that the scene at the lake might be the site of the psychic trauma. But he’ll soon learn of an earlier encounter between Herr K. and Dora. We’re told that at the age of fourteen, Dora found herself alone with Herr K. while watching a church festival. Then he “suddenly clasped the girl to him and pressed a kiss upon her lips” (21).1 Instead of reading this as a scene of sexual assault, Freud is confused by Dora’s response: “This was surely just the situation to call up a distinct feeling of sexual excitement in a girl of fourteen who had never before been approached. But Dora had at that moment a violent feeling of disgust, tore herself free from the man, and hurried past him to the staircase and from

19 there to the street door” (21). Dora’s feelings of disgust and revulsion are the markers of desire gone wrong for Freud, and so it is perhaps not surprising that Freud pathologizes Dora’s response:

I should without question consider a person hysterical in whom an occasion for sexual excitement elicited feelings that were preponderantly or exclusively unpleasant … The elucidation of the mechanisms of this reversal of affect is one of the most important and at the same time one of the most difficult problems in the psychology of the neuroses. (22)

For Freud, Herr K.’s kiss should produce “sexual excitement,” but instead Dora feels it as “preponderantly or exclusively unpleasant.” This reversal of affect, in addition to the “excessive intensity” of those affects (23), marks Dora as a hysteric.

Despite Dora’s response to the kiss, Freud will go on to claim that Dora is actually in love with her assailant. Upon interpreting her aphonia, or loss of voice, Freud argues for “the following symbolic interpretation. When the person she loved was away she gave up speaking; speech had lost its value since she could not speak to him” (33). The “him” here is Herr K., who would often have to leave on business. In a footnote, Freud describes this translation of affect to somatic response as a “flight into illness” (36). Freud’s turn of phrase highlights precisely how, when in danger, our fight or flight response will kick in. This flight into illness is, as he explains, “economically the most convenient solution when there is a mental conflict” (36). Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English make a similar claim in their 1970s manifesto, Complaints and Disorders: The Sexual Politics of Sickness: “In the epidemic of hysteria, women were both accepting their inherent ‘sickness’ and finding a way to rebel against an intolerable social role” (89-90). In a world in which women are meant to feel desire when any man kisses them, there’s no way to resolve this conflict. And so sickness becomes a means to escape.

I can’t help but wonder if there’s another reading of Dora’s aphonia. It would be much too dangerous to speak of these assaults while Herr K. is present to refute them. His leaving, then, would provide the ideal opportunity for Dora to tell her parents what happened, for her to express “the suppressed thoughts which are struggling for expression” (34). This loss of voice would appear to be inconveniently timed: a cruel joke that makes it impossible for Dora to speak 20 her trauma. This inability to speak is actually a protective mechanism, the work of Dora’s sympathetic nervous system (or what Freud call the unconscious). For even if she could speak of her trauma, Dora will not be believed. “Falling ill,” Freud writes in a footnote, “involves a saving of psychical effort; it emerges as being economically the most convenient solution when there is a mental conflict … even though in most cases the ineffectiveness of such an escape becomes manifest at a later stage” (36). And so this loss of voice is her body’s way of protecting her from the double trauma of having her family disbelieve her.2

We might also consider this loss of voice as an act of resistance. In Disquieting: Essays on Silence, Cynthia Cruz argues that silence is a form of resistance. Cruz explains how she’s been haunted by a question: “How does one speak when one is weighed down with the incomprehensibility of the world?” (10). “This oppressive weight,” of systemic oppression, “added to experiences of trauma on top of trauma makes for a kind of inability to speak,” Cruz writes (11). This speechlessness is “often driven into the body as illness” (11). Silence becomes a mode of resistance, “the refusal to conform” (16). Dora’s loss of voice is a mode of resistance and an acknowledgment that any attempt to speak her trauma will result in silence anyway.3

Remembering that Dora’s symptoms began at a much earlier age, I want to argue that Freud and Breuer were right when they proposed in their Preliminary Statement to Studies on Hysteria, that neuroses emerge when it’s not possible for the subject to adequately respond to the psychical trauma they’ve experienced.4 Breuer and Freud explain that there are “at least two sets of conditions under which the reaction to the trauma has not occurred” (13). The first, and most important for our understanding of Dora, includes cases in which the “nature of the trauma precluded a reaction, as in the seemingly irreplaceable loss of a loved one, or because social circumstances made a reaction impossible, or because things were involved that the patient wanted to forget” (13). Dora’s loss of voice, I argue, is the somatic response to the fact that “social circumstances made a reaction impossible.”

If only Freud had reached this hypothesis. Unfortunately, the psychoanalyst moves away from the recognition that Dora was sexually assaulted to claim that Dora’s hysteria is caused by her desire “to touch her father’s heart and to detach him from Frau K.” (39). Here, real sexual abuse becomes a sexual fantasy. But Freud will also dismiss this hypothesis in favour of another, one 21 that removes all men from the equation: Dora is actually in love with Frau K., and that her queer desire is the source of her illness (96).5 Freud is never able to fully prove these claims, however, as Dora terminates her sessions with the psychoanalyst without warning at the start of their third session together. In a move that feels like Freud’s only avenue to punishing the disobedient Dora, he will conclude in “An Autobiographical Study,” that he was “at last obliged to recognize that these scenes of seduction had never taken place, and that they were only fantasies which my patients had made up” (34).

This conclusion will not only save Freud from the embarrassment of being undermined by Dora, it also protects him from deriving a hypothesis that could ruin his career. Judith Herman explains that Freud was “increasingly troubled by the radical social implications of his hypothesis”: that at the bottom of every case of hysteria there were one or more occurrences of premature sexual experience. Herman writes:

Hysteria was so common among women that if his patients’ stories were true, and if his theory were correct, he would be forced to conclude that what he called “perverted acts against children” were endemic, not only among the proletariat of Paris, where he had first studied hysteria, but also among the respectable bourgeois families of Vienna, where he had established this practice. This idea was simply unacceptable. It was beyond credibility. (14)

So how does Freud rescue himself from proclaiming that young women were living in rape culture?

As it turns out, he’ll abandon his seduction theory, which held that hysteria was caused by repressed memories of infantile sexual abuse, and instead propose that hysterics imagined these scenes. In the introduction to Freud and Joseph Breuer’s Studies in Hysteria, Rachel Bowlby explains how “Sexuality was indeed at the centre; but as something imagined, rather than actually undergone, by the child” (xxiii). The individual is thus the one to blame and the one in need of a cure. Years before the phrase gaslighting was coined, Freud was already putting it into practice: rape is transformed into seduction.6 And it is Dora who is punished for rebelling.7 22

Thankfully, with the resurgence of Dora that began with second wave feminism, in what Martha Noel Evans has referred to as “the hysterical phase of French feminism” (205), feminist scholars and psychoanalysts returned to rescue Dora from Freud’s hypotheses. Elaine Showalter summarizes this return to Dora as follows: “Women in the French feminist movement, many of whom were psychoanalysts themselves, saw hysteria as symbolic of women’s silencing within the institutions of language, culture, and psychoanalysis” and thus “seized hysteria as a political cause” (56). 8 Showalter explains how, for these thinkers, which include Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray, “the silent nonverbal ‘body language’ of hysteria can be seen as a Mother Tongue that contests patriarchal culture” (57). Hysteria, for them, is the body’s response to living in patriarchal structures of gendered and sexualized inequality. And so it is that Cixous asks in The Newly Born Woman: “What woman is not Dora?” (47). French feminists thus made it all too clear that any analysis of individual trauma must be understood within the context of the social and political worlds in which these women lived. In fact, to borrow the words of Staci K. Haines, “there is something happening in the social and economic fabric that actually supports, or allows for” these traumas (84). Thus, if we want to imagine a world without trauma, we need to consider both the individual experience and the larger social frameworks that we exist in.

While the term “hysteria” can no longer be found in the pages of the DSM, in the final chapter of this dissertation I demonstrate how the spectre of hysteria can be found in the treatment of girls and women who live with trauma and/or chronic illness.9 Put another way: the story of chronic illness is also the story of hysteria and trauma.10 Before I turn to a discussion of sick theories, I’d like to look first at the ways in which the figure of the hysteric has been more recently revived and embraced by girls, women, and femmes. In so doing, I wish to bring to light how these attempts to depathologize the hysteric have produced new forms of care, connection, and healing that I’ve called “hysterical intimacies.” The forms of interdependence that refuse to erase one’s trauma take shape in the hysterical intimacies that I detail in each chapter. From the interspecies dependence in chapter 2, to the brief sexual encounters of chapter 3, and the webs of connection fostered through online communities in chapter 4, trauma does not need to threaten intimacy. Rather, trauma can enable us to imagine new forms of intimacy that refuse to bypass the traumas we’ve suffered. 23

Hysterical Intimacies

Alongside a revival of trauma studies came a reclaiming of the hysteric, and the symptoms of excess and ambivalence, with fourth-wave feminism.11 At the forefront of this reclamation is the twenty-seven year old Petra Collins. Collins first big claim to fame came when she was asked to design a t-shirt for American Apparel. Entitled “Menstruation Power” Collins’ t-shirt depicts a femme hand with long painted nails gently touching the clitoris, legs spread, pubic hair, menstrual blood, and all.12 Her t-shirt was called “vile” and “disturbing.”13 Continuing in this tradition, Collins launched an exhibit entitled Discharge in 2014. The exhibit uses a variety of mediums to discuss the sexuality of those assigned female at birth: from neon lights that say, again and again, “I love it, I love it, I love it when you eat it” to sculptures of beautiful panties stained with menstrual blood.

In Dora, Freud notes how women take a special amount of pride in their genitals and that this is “quite a special feature of their vanity” (75). Freud continues by stating that “an abnormal secretion of the mucous membrane of the vagina is looked upon as a source of disgust” in women (75). Collins confronts and challenges Freud's claim, sculpting and laying out her period- stained panties as statues for viewers to admire. Instead of feeling humiliated or disgusted Collins’ revels in her secretions. In a 2014 talk at the Art Gallery of Ontario, “21st-Century Art: Why Feminism Still (Really) Matters,” Collins recounts how when she first got her period, she took her pad to her father and exclaimed: “Look how much blood there is!” Instead of disgust, there is pleasure. And that pleasure is excessive. It’s not just one pair of panties, but many. It is not just one iteration of “I love it when you eat it,” but ten – with “I love it” being repeated twenty-two times.

Collins most explicit engagement with the legacy of hysteria came in her 2016 exhibition, 24 Hour Psycho. Collins displayed ten large-scale portraits of her friends’ faces while crying. In an interview with Dazed Magazine, Collins explains her motivations for the project: “Women’s emotions are constantly labeled. Any slight deviation from ‘pleasantness,’ and we are labeled as hysterical. When we are angry, sad, depressed, or manic, we are immediately seen as unfeminine, or ugly, or weak.” 24

Collins decision to print these photos on such a large scale makes the images excessive in both form and content – evoking the ways in which the feelings of girls and young women have always been “too much.” In embracing the hysteric, these girls and women have refused to be isolated, locked away, and silenced. Instead, they’ve put their trauma on display for all to see.

Reading through the pages of Freud’s case study of Dora, you’ll find the word “excessive” and its synonyms come up again and again. There is Dora’s “excessively repulsive fantasy” (45); her “excessive reinforcement” (48); the “surplusage of intensity” she experiences (48); and “excessive overaccentuation” (124). In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud categorizes hysterics as “excessively civilized persons” due to the strength of their restrictive forces: shame, morality, and most importantly, disgust. Within the hysteric exists an “exaggerated sexual craving” to borrow Freud’s phrasing (31).14 While Freud marked excess as a negative affective state that is pathological, the work being done by Collins and others to embrace excess demonstrates how the only thing that makes excess pathological is labelling it as such.

Excess isn’t the only symptom of hysteria that’s being reclaimed by feminists. Ambivalence has also found itself at the centre of fourth-wave feminist art. Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis define ambivalence as the “simultaneous existence of contradictory tendencies, attitudes or feelings in relation to a single object, especially the co-existence of love and hate” (np.) – and it is this definition that “Ambivalently Yours” takes up in her work.15 Ambivalently Yours (AY) is the pseudonym for the Montreal-based artist who first began her project of reclaiming ambivalence on Tumblr in 2012. AY describes her artistic practice on her website as follows:

By allowing myself to work from an ambivalent perspective and accept my conflicting opinions, the passivity of being undecided is transformed into a conscious act of undeciding … I aim to create platforms and spaces where we can invest in our contradictions and differences instead of trying to homogenise them. I believe that an ambivalent approach to feminist action allows for multiple emotions, identities and definitions to co-exist, creating a more inclusive feminist movement that can resist and evolve within the dominant culture. 25

I read AY’s description of her project and I recall Freud’s claim in his analysis of Dora that “thoughts in the unconscious live very comfortably side by side, and even contraries get on together without disputes” (54). Lauren Berlant unpacks Freud’s statement in her book Desire/Love: “In Freud’s model the confirming and caring economy of love, involving both giving and receiving on the model of maternal plenitude, is all bound up with an economy of aggression. In this model, to love an object is to attempt to master it, to seek to destroy its alterity or Otherness. Here, aggression is not the opposite of love, but integral to it” (25).16

Similarly, in an article for the London Review of Books “Against Self-Criticism,” Adam Phillips states: “In Freud’s vision we are, above all, ambivalent animals: wherever we hate we love, wherever we love we hate. If someone can satisfy us, they can frustrate us; and if someone can frustrate us we always believe they can satisfy us.” Phillips observes that, “ambivalence is the way we recognise that someone or something has become significant to us,” that “wherever there is an object of desire there must be ambivalence.” The sick girls I discuss throughout my dissertation recognize this as well. By acknowledging their ambivalent relation to their bodies and desires, they make intimacy possible. Trauma and sickness do not have to impede intimacy. For these sick girls, the qualities that make the hysteric pathological – her love of ambivalence and excess – can open up other possibilities for care and interdependence that make life not just possible, but pleasurable. Intimacy is what happens – and, I would argue, can only happen – when bodies come together in all of their messiness and ambivalence are affirmed and cared for.

In a sense, all intimacy is, in part, hysterical in the way I have described it because intimacy requires that we what might be deemed “too much” for someone else. In the landscape of hysterical intimacies, however, there’s a key difference: within this exchange, in which I expose myself before you and you choose to stick around, you also celebrate my too muchness – it might even turn you on. When it comes to hysterical intimacies, there’s no such thing as over- sharing, no pathologization of affects. If what I’ve shared “exceeds” the boundaries of what is deemed “normal” or “healthy,” you, my intimate person, do not feel what I’ve shared is too much. In fact, you’ll respond by asking for more and you’ll offer yourself up to me, letting me into those dark depths, so that the closeness we foster is built upon a reciprocal exchange. Neither of us is forced to be more or less vulnerable than the other. 26

In her introduction to the special issue on Intimacy, Berlant writes: “intimacy builds worlds; it creates spaces and usurps places meant for other kinds of relation. Its potential failure to stabilize closeness always haunts its persistent activity, making the very attachments deemed to buttress ‘a life’ seem in a state of constant if latent vulnerability” (282). The possibility of failure is another way intimacy functions as a site of ambivalence. Or, as Naomi Morgenstern suggested to me, “Intimacy also functions as a site of ambivalence insofar as it is always exposed to failure.” Berlant’s claim that intimacy is filled with contradictory desires is significant in this regard: “People want to be both overwhelmed and omnipotent, caring and aggressive, known and incognito. These polar energies get played out in the intimate zones of everyday life and can be recognized in psychoanalysis, yet mainly they are seen not as intimacy but as a danger to it” (285). While she never states it explicitly, it’s safe to say that Berlant rejects the claim that contradictory and ambivalent desires pose a threat to intimacy. In fact, for her, intimacy is constituted by this ambivalence. If we can define hysteria as both a site of excess and an ambivalence, as I have suggested, then hysterical intimacies can be understood as another name for intimacy that is not threatened by “contradictory desires”; rather, I argue that these contradictory desires form the very structure of hysterical intimacies.

To be hysterical in one’s intimacy is to acknowledge and accept the ways in which our most intimate relations threaten our sense of a coherent and stable subjectivity. Berlant develops her discussion of intimacy’s contradictory affects in her dialogue with Lee Edelman in Sex, or the Unbearable. In the opening pages of the text, they call into question the use of “or” in the title, proposing instead a much more ambivalent position of both/and: “the title of this book does not offer its readers a choice between these two terms, as in ‘your money, or your life.’ Nor does it mean to imply that we think of sex as reducible to the ‘unbearable.’ To be honest, there’s not that much sex in the book either, and the ‘unbearable’ to which it points is all crossed over with the enjoyable too. But then again, enjoyment itself, as we discuss it here, can be unbearable” (vii). Sex, for Berlant and Edelman, is a metonym for intimacy more broadly. Sex is a site “at which relationality is invested with hopes, expectations, and anxieties that are often experienced as unbearable” (vii). Why is intimacy so unbearable? Because when an “I” becomes a “we,” there is little we can do to control the other. We give them both/and our hearts and bodies and hope they won’t hurt us. But the reality is that they will hurt us at some point, because humans are messy 27 and fostering and maintaining intimacy, while providing us with a sense of anchoring in the world, is also deeply terrifying – especially if you live with trauma.

Hysterical intimacies hold space for the traumas of living in a world defined by systemic violence and inequality. If, as Judith Herman proposes, “The traumatic event thus destroys the belief that one can be oneself in relation to others” (53), hysterical intimacies work from the belief that trauma doesn’t have to threaten interdependence; rather, naming and recognizing trauma can help us foster intimacy. Herman continues: “In the aftermath of traumatic life events, survivors are highly vulnerable. Their sense of self has been shattered. That sense can be rebuilt only as it was built initially, in connection with others” (61). And this connection can happen by “Sharing the traumatic experience with others, which is a precondition for the restitution of a sense of a meaningful world” (70). It is for this reason that rape survivor Susan Brison wishes to “defend a view of the self as fundamentally relational—capable of being undone by violence, but also of being remade in connection with others” (xi). Brison argues that it is vital that the survivor of trauma be able to construct a narrative and that they find “an empathetic listener” willing to bear witness (59). The act of telling one’s story to another enables healing and the reconstruction of a self that has been violently shattered by trauma, and reveals the ways in which “the autonomous self and the relational self are shown to be interdependent, even constitutive of one another” (61).17 This view of the self as “both autonomous and socially dependent” (38) poses a threat to the late capitalist, neoliberal fantasy of the independent individual.18

Rejecting this myth of the individual threatens the status quo because it reveals the ways in which, to borrow Johanna Hedva’s words, “it’s the world that needs the fixing” (Section 4). Hedva describes the impact of the neoliberal, white-supremacist, imperial-capitalist, cisheteropatriarchy in their essay “Sick Woman Theory “when they write: “Sick Woman Theory maintains that the body and mind are sensitive and reactive to regimes of oppression … It is that all of our bodies and minds carry the historical trauma of this, that it is the world itself that is making and keeping us sick” (Section 5). Hysterical intimacies reveal the ways in which the oppressions we experience do not come from our individual shortcomings, but rather are the direct result of the structures of oppression that produce great trauma. Hysterical intimacies recognize that interdependence enables us to resist and heal from the systemic and individual 28 traumas that have made us sick. Within the landscape of hysterical intimacies, the sick body receives the care and intimacy it so deserves.

This longing for intimacy, and more specifically touch, is something that Audre Lorde reflects on in The Cancer Journals, After having a mastectomy, Lorde writes: “The status of untouchable is a very unreal and lonely one” (29). For Lorde, the status of untouchable protects her as she heals: “it does keep everyone at arm’s length, and protects as it insulates” (29). And yet, her desire for touch renders its lack harmful: “You can die of that specialness, of the cold, the isolation. It does not serve living” (29). Lorde thus “began quickly to yearn for the warmth of the fray” (29). While Lorde may be rendered untouchable for practical reasons here, under the surface of her reflection, of her yearning, is the recognition that sick bodies are always already positioned as bodies to be kept “at arm’s length.” Intimacy, figured here as “the warmth of the fray,” withdraws from the sick woman and she is left cold and isolated.

I read Lorde’s writing and I think of the hysterical women at the Salpêtrière. As I’ll discuss in chapter 4, the only intimacy they experienced was with the doctors who studied them and the audiences they were performing in front of in Jean-Martin Charcot’s weekly lectures. I’m also reminded of today’s chronically ill woman, trapped in hospital beds or at home, who experiences contact largely through phone screens and social media. In these isolated landscapes, what does intimacy look like? What does it look like for the young Black girls having babies in the American South who’re told that by getting pregnant, they’re part of an epidemic when really they’re trapped in a national endemic? What if the intimacy that you so desire cannot be spoken without risking pathologization, as is the case for the young women in chapter three who desire ugly and fleeting sexual encounters? How might we reimagine intimacy in a world that seeks to isolate the sick, traumatized, and hysterical from the “warmth of the fray”? In order to answer these questions, I propose that we need sick theories. Sick theories work to bridge the divide between chronically ill, the traumatized and hysterical, and the disabled community. In bringing these communities together, we can enact the forms of communal care that are needed to not only survive, but to thrive. 29

Sick Theories

In 2016, I got sick and then I stayed sick. During this time I realized just how alone I was. Despite the rich community I’d built, I didn’t know many others living with chronic illness. It was at that point that I came up with the idea for Sick Theories: A Trans-Disciplinary Conference on Sickness and Sexuality.19 I reached out to Lauren Fournier, who works as an artist, curator, and interdisciplinary researcher, to bring this vision to life. In our call for papers, we described the driving questions behind Sick Theories: “What does it mean to be sick, as opposed to being ill? What directions might critical disability studies, mad studies, sexual diversity studies, and queer theory take us as we reconsider what it means to be sick?” Over the course of two days, we brought together scholars, writers, artists, activists, and educators to untangle the relationships between sickness and sexuality. Sick Theories included panels, workshops, an art exhibit and artist roundtable, and a keynote address by Johanna Hedva.

The discussions that took place at Sick Theories helped to clarify some of the tensions I was sensing in the field of disability studies – between those that Susan Wendell refers to as the healthy disabled and the unhealthy disabled. In her essay, “Unhealthy Disabled: Treating Chronic Illness as Disability,” Wendell argues that “healthy disabled” describes those “people whose physical conditions and functional limitations are relatively stable and predictable for the foreseeable future” (19). This includes those “who were born with disabilities or people who were disabled by accidents or illnesses later in life, but they regard themselves as healthy, not sick, they do not expect to die any sooner than any other healthy person their age, and they do not need or seek much more medical attention than other healthy people” (19). The “unhealthy disabled,” on the other hand, includes those living with “HIV/AIDS, fibromyalgia, myalgic encephalomyelitis/ chronic fatigue immune dysfunction syndrome (ME/CFIDS), and other chronic illnesses” (19). Wendell is careful to note that many people who have stable disabilities may experience recurring chronic health issues, and so these categories are not static (20). And yet, despite the instability, those living with chronic illnesses and other unhealthy disabilities have a hard time finding themselves in the pages of disability studies.

In their collection of essays, Sex and Disability, Robert McRuer and Anna Mollow offer one explanation for this omission: 30

Taken together, many influential texts in the field of disability studies can be said to have codified a model identity of a disabled person, who has certain crucial characteristics: his or her body manifests visible difference; physical suffering is not a primary aspect of his or her experience; and he or she is not seeking cure or recovery. In these ways, what might be seen as disability studies’ construction of a ‘paradigmatic’ disabled person differs from the self-understandings of many people with chronic pain and illness. (11-12)

McRuer and Morrow note how the exclusion of those living with invisible chronic illnesses from conversations of disability has material effects: “while the disability rights movement has succeeded in making requests for wheelchair ramps and American Sign Language interpretation seem, at least in some contexts, ‘reasonable,’ the accommodations that a person with EI [environmental illness] might need to request are most often regarded as wildly unreasonable” (12). Despite the fact that McRuer and Morrow make mention of those living with invisible chronic illnesses, including multiple chemical sensitivities, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, and chronic pain (10-11), they tend to follow in the footsteps of the influential texts they cite.20

Why has sickness been under-theorized in disability studies? Wendell highlights how one of the major aims of disability studies is to reject the logic of the cure that pathologizes disability as illness and lack.21 Wendell explains how the identification of disability with illness “contributes to the medicalization of disability, in which disability is regarded as an individual misfortune, and people with disabilities are assumed to suffer primarily from physical and/or mental abnormalities that medicine can and should treat, cure, or at least prevent” (17). I understand the impulse to reject the narrative that disabled equals sick equals in need of a cure. And at the same time, I believe that it’s imperative to recognize that if we reject sickness as a related category to disability, we risk abandoning those who’re sick and foreclose the possibility of lines of connection and collectivity. Perhaps, instead of investing one’s energy in untethering sickness and disability, we could turn our attention to our shared project of challenging the medical- industrial complex, which pathologizes both categories and positions the cure as necessary.22 31

In addition to rejecting the logic of the cure, we must shift the focus away from the individual and onto the systemic issues that make access to care difficult if not impossible for many. Alison Kafer argues that we need to move away from an understanding of disability that’s rooted in individual and medical models, in which “disability is cast as a problematic characteristic inherent in particular bodies and minds. Solving the problem of disability,” she notes, “means correcting, normalizing, or eliminating the pathological individual, rendering a medical approach to disability the only appropriate approach” (5). What we should be focusing on, instead, is increasing social supports and eliminating the barriers that uphold the ableist world that we live in (5). Kafer proposes a “political/relational model” that recognizes that “the problem of disability no longer resides in the minds or bodies of individuals but in built environments and social patterns that exclude or stigmatize particular kinds of bodies, minds, and ways of being” (6). With the political/relational model, Kafer draws attention to the ways that medical intervention is imbued with ableist values about what constitutes a good life. Such definitions of a good life become murkier when we look at those living with chronic illness, pain, and fatigue. As Kafer points out, “social and structural changes will do little to make one’s joints stop aching or to alleviate back pain. Nor will changes in architecture and attitude heal diabetes or cancer or fatigue” (7). In order for disability studies to include those who’re sick, the rejection of the cure needs to coexist alongside an understanding that those living with chronic pain and fatigue would welcome it. Those of us living with chronic pain occupy an ambivalent relationship to cure.23

Part of what I’m arguing for with sick theories, then, is a more nuanced and complex understanding of the ways that those who’re sick also want to challenge the ableist world we live in. At the same time, we can also desire a cure – not because we believe that there is something wrong with our bodies, but because the reality is that living in a constant state of pain is unbearable. Those living with chronic illness have a harder time moving away from Kafer’s notion of “curative time,” which describes how the medical industrial complex “not only expects and assumes intervention but also cannot imagine or comprehend anything other than intervention” (27).24 To always be oriented towards the future possibility of a cure makes it difficult to find something worthwhile in the present, and it also works to disavow the possibilities that can come with different experiences of the temporal. Sick theories is thus a response to the nuanced ways in which some bodies desire a cure, others dismiss it entirely, and many of us are left deeply ambivalent. 32

The other main point of tension between those who identify as disabled and those who’re chronically ill, is the ways in which certain bodies are recognized and coded as disabled. In Kindling: Writings on the Body, Aurora Levins Morales describes these differences by offering the following scene:

I have a close friend who has a form of Muscular Dystrophy called Infantile Progressive Spinal Muscular Atrophy. She is in a wheelchair and her muscles are too weak for her to lift her arms by herself or pick up objects. Her disability is obvious to anyone who sees her, and her challenge is to get people to understand that she is powerful and competent. On bad days, I am unable to get out of my bed, it takes all my energy to get to the bathroom, all my muscles and joints hurt, and a small amount of fragrance makes my whole body react strongly. But no-one can tell by looking at me. My challenge is to get people to understand that I have a real struggle. (70)

Morales lives with a host of autoimmune diseases and chronic illnesses, including Environmental Illness, fibromyalgia, and epilepsy. She points out how a typical understanding of “infectious diseases as a model of sickness, and wheelchair users as a model of disability,” places those living with chronic illnesses in a position where it is difficult, if not impossible, “for those who love us to understand our experience” (71).25

The symptoms of chronic illness remain largely invisible: fatigue might be read as simply being tired. And while this misreading provides the privilege of passing, it also makes it difficult to justify and claim access needs. Let’s take public transit as an example. On buses and subways you’ll find reserved seating for those who’re pregnant, elderly, or disabled. On days where my pain levels and fatigue are high, I desperately need one of those seats. Let’s say all of the seats are taken. Because I’m not visibly disabled – I do not use a cane or a mobility device – those occupying those seats do need read me as someone in need of a seat. Now of course I could ask someone who’s not elderly, pregnant, or visibly disabled to give up their seat for me. But what if they’re also someone living with an invisible disability?26

It’s important to name that invisible disabilities are often also episodic. In The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability, Wendell describes how her experiences with episodic illness places her in an ambivalent relationship to her status as disabled. While her 33 physical symptoms have lessened over time, she notes how “my struggles are now primarily social and psycho-ethical. I live in the world of the healthy (or fairly healthy). I do not ‘look sick’ or ‘sound sick,’ as people tell me all the time, and I think only those who know me well can see when I am having a hard time with fatigue, nausea, or pain” (3). Wendell describes her existence as living “between the world of the disabled and the non-disabled” (76). She explains:

I am often very aware of my differences from healthy, non-disabled people, and I often feel a great need to have my differences acknowledged when they are ignored … On the other hand, I am very aware of how my social, economic, and personal resources, and the fact that I can “pass” as non-disabled among strangers, allow me to live a highly assimilated life among the non-disabled. (76)

Wendell highlights how being invisibly disabled presents a different set of access issues for the chronically ill, while also affording many privileges.27 Thus much is at stake when the disabled community and state regulating bodies refuse to believe those with non-visible disabilities: not only a lack of state funded supports, but also access to a community that understands what it’s like to live with a body that doesn’t act “as it should.”28 Recognizing the episodic nature of chronic illness is another way in which sick theories hopes to add to the conversations happening within disability studies.

Despite the points of contention that I’ve just outlined, sick theories share many of the same beliefs and aims as those working in disability studies. Namely, that we must do away with the medical-industrial complex and dismantle the pervasive climate of ableism that works to oppress and exclude differently abled bodies.29 But we cannot do so by abandoning those living with chronic illnesses. Within sick theories, we can acknowledge, without resolving, the sick person’s ambivalent relationship to the cure. Sick theories also holds space for the complicated terrain of power and privilege within disability studies, recognizing the ways that the ability to pass is both a blessing and a curse for those living with invisible illnesses. By proposing sick theories as a framework for thinking about chronic illness, which includes those living with trauma, my hope is that this dissertation offers an intervention into the field of disability studies.

Chronic illness remains fairly under-theorized, but there are some foundational texts that have inspired my own thinking. One of the most significant is Hedva’s “Sick Woman Theory.” An 34 antagonist of the medical-industrial complex, Hedva notes that “it’s important that I also share the Western medical terminology that’s been attached to me – whether I like it or not, it can provide a common vocabulary” (Section 3). Their diagnoses include endometriosis, bipolar disorder, panic disorder, depersonalization disorder, and finally “an autoimmune disease that continues to baffle all the doctors I’ve seen, has come to me and refuses still to be named” (Section 3). Hedva’s essay was written in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2014. Too sick to get out of bed and out onto the street to join other activists, Hedva explains how “the central question of Sick Woman Theory formed: How do you throw a brick through the window of a bank if you can’t get out of bed?” (Section 1).

Hedva’s “Sick Woman Theory” takes as its first site of inspiration Audre Wollen’s “Sad Girl Theory.” Wollen became famous for taking photos in which she poses as various famous sad girls in art.30 Instead of girls always being happy, Wollen’s creative practice tapped into sadness as a site for political resistance. In a 2015 interview in Dazed Magazine, she explains:

Sad Girl Theory is a permission slip: feminism doesn’t need to advocate for how awesome and fun being a girl is. Feminism needs to acknowledge that being a girl in the world right now is one of the hardest things there is – it is unimaginably painful – and that our pain doesn’t need to be discarded in the name of empowerment. It can be used as a material, a weight, a wedge, to jam that machinery and change those patterns.

What I find so compelling about Wollen’s project is how it works to depathologize the affects that have long been attributed to girls and have earned them the label “hysterical.”

Building on Wollen’s project, Hedva explains how “Sad Girl Theory” “proposes a way of redefining historically feminized pathologies into modes of political protest for girls: I was mainly concerned with the question of what happens to the sad girl when, if, she grows up” (Section 4). As a non-binary person, Hedva is careful to note that their choice of “woman” is not meant to exclude those who identify as men, or those who’re non-binary or gender non- conforming: “Though the identity of ‘woman’ has erased and excluded many (especially women of color and trans and genderfluid people), I choose to use it because it still represents the un- cared for, the secondary, the oppressed, the non-, the un-, the less-than” (Section 5). In “Touch Me, I’m Sick,” I want to collapse the distinction that Hedva makes between sad girls and sick 35 women and will at times use the terms girls and women interchangeably. I take my cue from the women in the texts I discuss, who often use the moniker “girl” to refer to themselves and other women their age. While many women wish to reject the label of “girl,” arguing that it’s paternalistic, I align my own thinking with those who wish to hang onto and reclaim the category of the girl.

I also wish to introduce “femme” as one way to acknowledge how, when we say “girls and women,” we’re all too often referring to those who are cis gender – thus excluding trans women and those who identify as non-binary and gender non-conforming. While “Femme is a queer identity that originated in working-class lesbian communities of the 1950s,” Andi Schwartz notes how it “has evolved to include all queer genders and sexualities that dabble in femininity” (71).31 Importantly, femme isn’t just a gender identity or expression: it is a politics. Schwartz explains: “Femme is queer in its approach to gender and sexuality, serving as a political indictment against misogyny in all its forms” (71). To be femme is also to be hysterical. In her essay “Two or Three Things I Know for Sure About Femmes and Suicide,” Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha points out that “Femmes are stereotyped across the board as ‘too much’: too loud, too crazy, too emotional, too demanding, too many accessories. ‘High maintenance,’ ‘needy,’ ‘hysterical’ are curse words” (195). This history of pathologizing femmes has real stakes: “Being perceived as too much can kill you” (Piepzna-Samarasinha 195). Girls, women, femmes; hysterical, traumatized, sick: all of these identifies have been pathologized.

Hedva’s emphasis on the relationship between sickness and pathology is especially pertinent for my work. Hedva never explains why they prefer the word “sick” over “ill,” but their description of the sick woman points to the ways that “sickness” is more negatively charged than “illness.” 32

The Sick Woman is all of the “dysfunctional,” “dangerous” and “in danger,” “badly behaved,” “crazy,” “incurable,” “traumatized,” “disordered,” “diseased,” “chronic,” “uninsurable,” “wretched,” “undesirable” and altogether “dysfunctional” bodies belonging to women, people of color, poor, ill, neuro-atypical, differently abled, queer, trans, and genderfluid people, who have been historically pathologized, hospitalized, institutionalized, brutalized, rendered “unmanageable,” and therefore made culturally illegitimate and politically invisible. (Section 5) 36

Hedva may not make explicit mention of the hysteric, but she can be found in so many of the epitaphs listed above: “badly behaved,” “crazy,” “traumatized,” and “diseased.”33 As I’ll demonstrate in Chapter 4, there is a long history of medical health professionals characterizing the chronically ill woman as hysterical.34 Embracing the hysteric – or Hedva’s “sick woman” – is part of a political project to reimagine the world that we live in. For Hedva, “The most anti- capitalist protest is to care for another and to care for yourself … To protect each other, to enact and practice community. A radical kinship, an interdependent sociality, a politics of care” (Section 6). I’d like to now explore how the disability justice movement, with its emphasis on a radical politics of care, has informed my own articulation of hysterical intimacies.

Towards a Radical Politics of Care

At the forefront of imagining a radical politics of care is Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. A self-defined neurodivergent survivor of violence with complex PTSD, Piepzna-Samararsinha is a queer femme of colour who lives with fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue immune deficiency syndrome (CFIDS). Piepzna-Samarasinha has been a disability justice activist for over thirty years, and her writing is informed by the disability justice movement, which began with queer and trans Black, Indigenous, and people of colour (QTBIPOC).35

Importantly, disability justice is not the same as disability rights. In Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, Piepzna-Samarasinha explains how disability rights places a white, male, cisgender, straight subject at the centre, whereas disability justice centralizes sick and disabled QTBIPOC. For those in the disability rights movement, the main focus is addressing ableism and removing barriers to access for the disabled community. Disability justice shares those aims but refuses to sacrifice an intersectional approach to addressing ableism. As Patty Berne argues: “We cannot comprehend ableism without grasping its interrelations with heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, colonialism and capitalism” (21).36 Building on Berne’s argument, Piepzna- Samarasinha’s definition of disability justice understands that “ableism helps makes racism, christian-supremacy, sexism, and queer- and transphobia possible” (22). This focus on intersectional forms of oppression can be hard to find in the liberal politics of the disability rights movement, with its focus on laws, rights, and legislation. While those in the disability justice movement require the very things that disability rights is fighting for, such as the Affordable Care Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act, Piepzna-Samarsinha wishes to note that “our 37 focus is less on civil rights legislation as the only solution to ableism and more on a vision of liberation that understands that the state was built on racist, colonialist ableism and will not save us, because it was created to kill us” (23).

Jasbir K. Puar makes a similar argument in The Right to Maim. Puar claims that we need to move away from the logic of rights discourses: “While the disability rights movement in large part understands disability as a form of nonnormativity that deserves to be depathologized, disability justice activists seek to move beyond access issues foregrounded by the Americans with Disabilities Act as well as global rights frames that standardize definitions of disability” (15). For Puar, the problem with rights discourses is that they “produce human beings in order to give them rights; they discriminate which bodies are vested with futurity, or more accurately, they cultivate (some/certain) bodies that can be vested with futurity” (15). Puar turns to disability justice activist Mia Mingus who summarizes the difference between disability rights and disability justice as follows: “disability rights works to bring disabled people to the table, whereas disability justice seeks to question the ways that “the entire ‘table’ or ‘system’ might need to change” (15).

In her keynote speech at the Femmes of Color Symposium in 2011, Mingus drew attention to the ways that those who experience other forms of marginalization based on class, race, ethnicity, gender identity, etc., might not be as willing to identify as disabled. Mingus’s talk “Moving Toward the Ugly: A Politic Beyond Desirability” describes how “Over and over I meet disabled women of color who do not identify as disabled, even though they have the lived reality of being disabled. And this is for many complicated reasons around race, ability, gender, access, etc. It can be very dangerous to identify as disabled when your survival depends on you denying it.” The dangers of identifying as disabled have their roots in ableism, which, as Mingus notes, “set the stage for queer and trans people to be institutionalized as mentally disabled; for communities of color to be understood as less capable, smart and intelligent, therefore ‘naturally’ fit for slave labor … for immigrants to be thought of as a ‘disease’ that we must ‘cure’ because it is ‘weakening’ our country.” To identify as disabled, then, holds additional stakes for these already marginalized subjects. 38

Puar’s engagement with Mingus results in a crucial intervention into discussions of ability/disability with the concept of “debility.” For Puar, debilitation is not the same as disablement but rather “foregrounds the slow wearing down of populations instead of the event of becoming disabled” (xiii-xiv). Debilitation is a process, not an identity; it is a “practice of rendering populations available for statistically likely injury” (xviii). Disablement has a before and an after, whereas debility “comprehends those bodies that are sustained in a perpetual state of debilitation precisely through foreclosing the social, cultural, and political translation to disability” (xiv). Debilitation is thus the terrain of the endemic, systemic, and chronic.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) defines endemic as “the constant presence and/or usual prevalence of a disease or infectious agent in a population within a geographic area.” In contrast, an epidemic is “an increase, often sudden, in the number of cases of a disease above what is normally expected in that population in that area.” The epidemic marks that which is exceptional, while the endemic is banal and quotidian. What escapes these definitions is the reality that the endemic, while seemingly banal, is no less threatening than the epidemic. In fact, for so many oppressed groups, the endemic is inherently more violent and traumatizing because it is woven into the very fabric of everyday life.

In our cultural moment, anti-Black violence is endemic, poverty is endemic, and violence against women, and trans women of colour in particular, is endemic. Remembering that that which is endemic is “the constant presence and/or usual prevalence of a disease or infectious agent in a population within a geographic area,” we can see how, within Black communities in the United States, anti-Black racism is a “constant presence,” an “infectious agent,” embodied by police brutality and the state-sanctioned murders of so many young Black men and women (and it is for these reasons that I often use the word endemic as a noun). These events are not exceptional within the Black community, but are framed as such by the state in order to excuse the behaviour of those responsible for these killings. The endemic nature of anti-Black racism is traumatic and highlights the ways in which trauma is not only caused by a shocking event – but rather is caused by events that are now so banal that they fail to shock. This understanding of trauma as endemic, as caused by systems of oppression, is integral to my discussion of hysteria, and particularly in chapter 2, where I discuss the misnomer that is the “teen pregnancy epidemic.” 39

The concept of the endemic is also connected to the chronic. Coming from the Greek word khronos (of time), chronic illnesses have no cure. There may be periods where the symptoms disappear, or the disease goes into remission, but there is always the possibility that they’ll return. The sicknesses I discuss throughout the dissertation, which include complex trauma and chronic pain, become endemic in the lives of girls, women, and femmes – and this is especially true for women of colour, and for Black people in general.

It thus makes sense that Puar begins her discussion of debility by referencing the rise of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. BLM is a direct response to the shootings of Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Philando Cistile, Alton Sterling, and so many other Black people in the United States.37 These shootings have placed Black subjects in a state of debility, in which one is afraid to leave the house out of fear that anything they do might result in their death. Thus it becomes the case that “we will not all be disabled,” writes Puar: “Some of us will simply not live long enough, embedded in a distribution of risk already factored into the calculus of debilitation. Death’s position” (xiv). Puar’s articulation of debility draws attention to the ways that “while some bodies may not be recognized as or identify as disabled, they may well be debilitated, in part by being foreclosed access to legibility and resources as disabled” (xv). Here we return to the problem of visibility and invisibility, of who gets read as disabled and who doesn’t. For the state, this lack of recognition enables the slow deaths, to borrow Lauren Berlant’s term, of those who’re already marginalized.

What I find most striking about Puar’s theorization of debility is the way that it illuminates how the state instrumentalizes disability rights in order to cover up the debilities that it produces. In this way, the state creates a model disabled subject that “can aspire both economically and emotionally to wellness, empowerment, and pride through the exceptionalized status it accrues” while those living in a state of debility are unable to reach such heights as they struggle to live in a state of bare life (xxiii).38 This logic works to erase “layers of precarity and vulnerability to police brutality, reckless maiming and killing, deprivation, and destruction of resources that are daily features of living for some populations” (xxiii).

It is the force of debility that I see operating in the way that the state has been positioning teen pregnancy as an epidemic since the 1960s. Despite the steady decline of teen pregnancy and teen 40 birth rates in the US, conservatives are still clinging to the language of epidemic in order to cover over the ways in which the government actively places teen moms in a constant state of debility. This is especially true for teen moms of colour living in the American south, where debility works on two registers. First, the lack of economic prospects leaves teens of colour in a precarious position in which having a child will provide greater economic security – through government welfare cheques – than the jobs they’d be able to secure in their small rural towns. Second, the refusal to implement mandatory comprehensive sex education or to make access to contraception and abortion more widely accessible means that there is very little teens can do to prevent or terminate an unwanted pregnancy. As I work to demonstrate in the next chapter, the language of epidemic covers over the truth that this is, in fact, a state-sanctioned endemic. I am thus struck by Berlant’s description of slow death as what happens when “the labor of reproducing life … is also the activity of being worn out by it” (28). For teen girls of colour in the American south, debility works such that in an attempt to avoid being worn out by life, these girls reproduce life, only to be further worn down.

What Puar’s work on debility emphasizes is the ways that the field of disability studies must expand to include those whose disabilities are inextricably linked to, if not caused by, systemic oppression. By considering the chronic, endemic, and traumatized vis-à-vis sick theories, I hope to broaden disability studies and to collaborate with it. While it is important to tease out the differences between disability and sickness, I wish to emphasize our affinities so that we can create an ecosystem of interdependence and care where we’re no longer reduced to varying states of bare life.

Interdependence is a fundamental tenet in the work of various sick and disabled writers and activists – and integral to my theorization of hysterical intimacies. adrienne maree brown defines interdependence as “mutual reliance” (87) that requires a shared commitment to vulnerability (21) and to the decentralization of power (82). This commitment takes shape in “a series of small repetitive motions” that we do again and again, when we have the capacity to do so (93). Working from a disability justice framework, brown is careful to acknowledge how “interdependence is not about the equality of offers in real time” (95). We may have to ask someone to support us, knowing that it might take a really long time before we can offer anything in return.39 In practicing interdependence, we must accept that we live in a responsive 41 ecosystem of flux and change. While I may have been able to lift you onto the toilet last week, when my body was relatively pain free, you cannot expect that I should always be able to do so.

In an essay entitled “What Happens When We Can’t Live Interdependently All the Time?” the anonymous author grapples with what it means for interdependency to ebb and flow:

If interdependency is in our DNA, what does it mean when we fall out of whack with it? How do we handle the realities of our bodies and minds that need what they need when they need it? What does it mean when I can’t support you in the ways you’re supporting me? Does interdependency mean we do the same for one another at all times, as though there’s even such a thing as “the same” when it comes to this stuff? Is it a gentle ebb and flow? What if my ebb will never match your flow? What if it’s sometimes a torrential downpour and one of us is drowning? What do we do then?

One possible response to the final question is that we must build our capacity for what brown calls “intentional adaptation” (69). To allow others to meet you where they’re at, and to be grateful for what they can offer you is integral to living interdependently. And what’s so incredible about committing ourselves to interdependence in this way is that we become less afraid of change and more able to embrace the messiness of failure. Because inevitably things will change and we will fail. What matters is that we can work together, that we can adapt and create new strategies for surviving and thriving through acts of care.

One cannot speak about care without acknowledging that this concept evokes great ambivalence. María Puig de la Bellacasa’s Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds illuminates how care is a vexed topic with competing definitions when she asks: “But what is care? Is it an affection? A moral obligation? Work? A burden? A joy? Something we can learn or practice? Something we just do?” (1). We’ve been taught that care should produce a “warm pleasant affection or a moralistic feel-good attitude” (2). But, as Bellacasa notes, feminists have worked hard to complicate such a definition of care, as it supports the ongoing exploitation of the emotional labour and care work performed by women – in Bellacasa’s words – or femmes and feminine folks in Piepzna-Samarasinha’s. When care is thus framed as an obligation, it will certainly leave us with some bad feelings. This is why Piepzna-Samarasinha stresses that when thinking of care, we must move away from the logics of charity and gratitude and towards an 42 understanding of care as an act of solidarity. The problem with acts of charity is that they all too often position the person receiving care as someone without the skills and abilities to survive on their own. Thus you, the person giving the charity, are placed in the position of the benevolent martyr. Moreover, those who give to charity often do so without any intention of changing the structures that oppress those receiving these acts of kindness. Acts of charity are not always acts of care.

It is thus vital that we understand that sick, traumatized, and disabled folks are the experts on their care needs, while at the same time recognizing that the very bodies that need care are afraid of asking for help. Piepzna-Samarasinha explains how “People’s fear of accessing care didn’t come out of nowhere. It came out of generations and centuries where needed care meant being locked up, losing your human and civil rights, and being subject to abuse” (39). One person’s care becomes another person’s harm. Things began to shift with the emergence of the disability rights movement in the 1960s and 70s, which fought for independent living and deinstitutionalization. And yet, those living with disabilities still struggle to access care attendants, and those who can are often left with inadequate care because they cannot afford to have care attendants to come multiple times a day as needed. If one can get access to personal care attendants, there are a whole host of other sacrifices that must be made, including accepting “queerphobia, transphobia, fatphobia or sexphobia from our care attendants” (40). It becomes all too clear that we need other models of care that involve “showing up for each other in mutual aid and respect” (41).

Piepzna-Samarasinha proposes the term “care webs” as one such model. Care webs are made up of chronically ill, mad, and disabled folks who offer varying forms of care to one another. These models range from a roster of humans who come to your home throughout the day to lift you on and off the toilet, cook meals for you, help you dress and bath, to online communities like the Sick and Disabled Queers Facebook group started by Billie Rain in 2010.40 Within this dissertation, you’ll see examples of care webs enacted in Jesmyn Ward’s novel Salvage the Bones, in which human and non-human entities come together to care for Esch and the baby growing inside of her. And then again, in the final chapter, I discuss another form of care web when I look at how sick women are using Instagram to build community and solidarity from their beds. I read each of these examples as a form of hysterical intimacy. 43

To track work that fosters hysterical intimacies is to refuse to erase trauma and sickness through the false promise of a cure, asking instead: how might we learn to inhabit the sick body in ways that don’t reproduce its traumas? Or, as is the case in the following chapter: how can we depathologize the bodies and desires that we’ve labelled as sick? In what follows, I hope to show how hysterical intimacies enable these sick girls, women, and femmes to resist the pathologizing logics of the colonialist, racist, and ableist cisheteropatriarchy that label certain bodies and desires as sick and in need of a cure. And in refusing these oppressive logics, we can access the world-building possibilities of a radical politics of care.

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Chapter Notes

1 Mahony notes how “Freud later downplayed the episode as the ‘little scene’ of a ‘thumb sucker’ (51, 74), thrice upgrading Dora to fourteen. And he also made Dora older for us by saying that one year (instead of two) had elapsed between the little scene and her subsequent erotic trauma when she was nearly sixteen” (9).

2 In my own experience with somatic therapy, I’ve learnt that when my fight response comes online to tell me that a boundary has been crossed, I’ll often feel like my throat is trying to swallow the sentences that wish to come out. Historically, it has never been safe for me to express my anger. And so my body tries to protect me by swallowing it.

3 I’m reminded here of Michel Foucault’s statement in The History of Madness, that “the language of psychiatry, which is a monologue by reason about madness, could only have come into existence in such a silence” (xxvii).

4 Cesare Romano and others have put forth the hypothesis that Dora’s father is the one who sexually abused her when she was five or six years old. Romano writes: “If, furthermore, it were true that, in accordance with my hypothesis, Dora was a victim of sexual abuse inflicted by her father during her early childhood—when she was five or six years old, thus exactly when [her father] contracted tuberculosis—and that the abuse implied oral contacts, Dora’s reaction of violent nausea and disgust to a contemporary of her father’s, Herr K., taking hold of her and kissing her on the mouth, would no longer be so incomprehensible. If this were the case, we would be dealing with a trauma that acts in two phases … That is, the trauma experienced with Herr K. would not have had an effect in itself, but rather in its rendering traumatic the recollection of an analogous sexual episode with the father which had occurred during Dora’s early childhood. This sexual episode, though, can only be presumed” (21). See also: Abhel- Rappe and Hengehold for similar hypotheses.

5 In fact, Freud will go so far as to argue that “an hysterical symptom is the expression of both a masculine and a feminine unconscious sexual fantasy” (118) and that hysteria is, in essence, bisexual in nature (119). For an in-depth analysis of Freud’s theory of Dora’s bisexuality, see 45

Gregorio Kohon who writes: “The hysteric cannot define herself as a man or as a woman because she cannot finally choose between her father or her mother. The hysteric will always remain in the middle, moving constantly between one and the other, without getting close to either one: petrified half-way, she postulates the impossible. She is half participating, half excluded” (81). Building on this claim, Kohon proclaims: “In that blind alley the hysteric cannot answer the fundamental problem posed to her: since there is a difference between the sexes, who is she, a woman or a man?” (82). See also Patrick J. Mahony, who proposes that Freud’s reading of Dora as bisexual was in fact a projection of his own bisexual desire, rooted in his relationship with Fleiss (22-24).

6 The term “gaslight” first came into use with Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play Gaslight, in which a man dims the gas lights in his home and then convinces his wife that she’s imagining the change. The term has been in use colloquially since the 1960s to describe the process of manipulating another person into believing that their perception of reality is false.

7 Judith Herman notes that Freud’s followers “held a particular grudge against the rebellious Dora, who was later described by a disciple as ‘one of the most repulsive hysterics he had ever met’” (14). Cf. F. Deutsch.

8 There is a long history of scholarship on Dora. Cf. In Dora's Case: Freud, Hysteria, Feminism, edited by Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane, which includes essays from Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, Jane Gallop, Jacques Lacan, Steven Marcus, Jacqueline Rose, and Toril Moi.

9 The DSMV eliminated hysteria as an official diagnosis in 1980, the same year that it added post-traumatic stress disorder. Hysteria has since been replaced with “conversion disorder.” See Jamieson Webster’s Conversion Disorder: Listening to the Body in Psychoanalysis.

10 It is not the case that all stories of chronic illness are also stories of trauma. But as I’ll discuss in chapter 4, the connection between trauma and chronic illness is becoming much more widely recognized (173-4). 46

11 For more on fourth-wave feminism and how it differs from its predecessors, see Gamble; Householder; Sollee.

12 Petra Collins, “Menstruation Power” VICE Magazine, 8 October 2013, www.vice.com/en/article/jmbxnk/chatting-with-petra-collins-about-her-menstruating-vagina- shirt.

13 Cf. Brown; Hamilton; McGuire.

14 Freud is not the only one to use the language of excess when talking about the young girl. In his two-volume treatise published in 1904, American psychologist and educator G. Stanley Hall argues that there is an “excessive unfoldment” that is “peculiar to this period” of life (xiv). For the adolescent girl, “every trait and faculty is liable to exaggeration and excess” (xv). Excess becomes tethered to sexuality when Hall discusses the excessive frustration or restrainment of sexuality (285) and links excessive menstruation to hysteria (497).

15 www.ambivalentlyyours.com/

16 Berlant is thinking, here, of Freud’s articulation of the pleasure principle and the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, published fifteen years after his analysis of Dora. Originally, Freud saw the pleasure principle (eros) as being in direct conflict with the death drive (thanatos). But then that all shifted when he was called upon to observe his grandson playing the “fort-da game.” Freud’s grandson, Ernst, is eighteen months old when he becomes fixed on a game in which he throws a wooden reel with string tied to it, only to retrieve the object again (hence the fort/gone and da/here). Freud concludes that each time the boy throws the object, he is re- enacting the pain (thanatos) of his mother leaving him to go to work. Each time he pulls it back, he is experiencing the pleasure (eros) of her returning home. Perplexed by the child’s actions, Freud reflects: “The going away of the mother cannot possibly have been pleasant for the child, nor even a matter of indifference. How then does his repetition of this painful experience in his play fit in with the pleasure principle?” (53). It fits because without pain, without the death drive, there would be no need for a pleasure principle. The two are the opposite sides of the same coin. 47

17 I’m reminded of Judith Butler’s words in Giving an Account of Oneself: “When the ‘I’ seeks to give an account of itself, it can start with itself, but it will find that this self is already implicated in a social temporality that exceeds its own capacities for narration; indeed, when the ‘I’ seeks to give an account of itself, [that] account […] must include the conditions of its own emergence” (8).

18 Nora Samaran astutely points out the ways that neoliberal capitalism converts human dependency into “a market exchange that keeps us circulating the things we need to live while disguising or denying relational responsibility, turning us into ‘lone individuals’ supposedly without need for others beyond a partner or atomized family” (9). Under this logic, resiliency is an individual trait best embodied by the belief that one can just pick themselves up by their bootstraps and carry on with their day.

19 To learn more about Sick Theories, please visit www.sicktheories.com

20 Within the pages of Sex and Disability, the representations of disability outside of the “model identity” include Chris Bell’s essay on HIV, Rachel Groner’s discussion of autism, and Lennard Davis’s reading of sex addition as disability. Nonetheless, more work that focuses on invisible illnesses is needed. And yet, even McRuer and Morrow note that, “despite AIDS activists’ indebtedness to the disability rights movement, this work currently tends to remain at an uneasy distance from disability scholars” (3).

21 One scholar who rejects this logic is Eli Clare. In Exile and Pride, Clare, who lives with cerebral palsy, offers a history of the freak show to demonstrate how, prior to the 1930s, disability was not viewed as pathology (97). Rather, Clare explains how “the Christian western world had encoded disability with many different meanings. Disabled people had sinned. We lacked moral strength. We were the spawn of the devil or the product of god’s will. Our bodies/minds reflected events that happened during our mothers’ pregnancies” (97). As soon as disability became “the exclusive domain of doctors and hospitals,” disability became the site for pity and tragedy (98) and disabled people were labeled as “sick, diseased” and thus in need of a cure (122). 48

22 For Clare “it is ableism that needs the cure, not our bodies” (122). For someone living with paralysis, then, the solution isn’t to cure their paralysis so that they can walk again; but, rather, to ensure that wheelchair access is built into every space, which includes ramps to get into doorways, automated doors, and accessible washrooms. Clare highlights how the Muscular Dystrophy Association (MDA) is invested in raising money to research a cure, “but won’t buy respirators for those who need them; big money on the next genetic breakthrough, but not on life bars to make bathrooms accessible” (123). What these priorities imply is that it is the disabled individual that is the problem, not the world we live in.

23 Alyson Pastavas captures this ambivalence when she writes: “To be clear, I would not necessarily turn down medical advances that alleviate or eliminate my chronic pain, but the complicated quest for a medical cure makes curing pain not only desirable but also compulsory” (208).

24 Building on Kafer’s “curative time,” Eunjung Kim coins her own term, “curative violence” (10), which captures the way that the future-focused emphasis on the cure also forecloses “ways to support, in the present, ‘un-treated’ and ‘incurable’ lives, that is, people who have a disability or an illness, as well as people who refuse or cannot afford treatments” (7).

25 Morales offers a compelling argument for understanding why chronic illnesses remain largely misunderstood, claiming that our model for illness is infectious disease: “Our medical system developed through the fight against infectious diseases. With infections, one microbe causes more or less the same symptoms in all people, and all people with that disease get it from the same cause. But the newer chronic illnesses that have appeared or become much more common in the recent period (EI, CFIDS, Fibromyalgia) often have many causes, and can show up differently in different people, which makes it very hard for medical science to figure out what to do about them” (68). Morales claim is supported by the fact that the seminal texts that theorize illness, such as Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors, focus on infectious diseases such as HIV and tuberculosis.

26 In 2017, Toronto disability activist Kate Welsh devised a solution to this problem when she created Equity Buttons. On each button is a different phrase: “Please Offer Me a Seat,” “My 49

Disability is Episodic,” and “My Disability is Invisible.” In an interview with CBC News, Welsh explains how she created the buttons to help a friend with cancer who found herself needing a seat after chemotherapy treatments. The TTC created its own buttons in 2018, which reads, “Please Offer Me a Seat” (see Burman). Unfortunately – and perhaps not surprisingly – the TTC did so without consulting Welsh or any other disability activists. Welsh notes: “It’s a trend that people with disabilities do the activism and it gets taken … and people with disabilities don’t get credit.” You can buy Welsh’s buttons at https://www.equitybuttons.com/shop/.

27 In her essay “My Body, My Closet: Invisible Disability and the Limits of Coming-Out Discourse,” Ellen Samuels similarly recognizes how the ability to pass “provides both a certain level of privilege and a profound sense of misrecognition and internal dissonance” (239). In order to be recognized as disabled, one must make a verbal declaration and risk being disbelieved.

28 See Wendell’s discussion of this history in The Rejected Body (12).

29 In using the term climate, I’m evoking Christina Sharpe’s discussion of the pervasive climate of anti-Blackness in America in her book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being.

30 See Lucy Watson’s “How girls are finding empowerment through being sad online.”

31 See also: Joan Nestle, The Persistent Desire: A Butch-Femme Reader (Boston: Alyson Publications, 1992); Chloë Brushwood Rose and Anna Camilleri (eds.). Brazen Femme: Queering Femininity; Elizabeth Martson, “Rogue Femininity.” Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme.

32 I’d hoped to glean more insight into Hedva’s word choice during our Q&A at the Sick Theories conference. Unfortunately for me, when I asked Hedva why they chose “sick” rather than “ill,” and they replied that they hadn’t thought about their preference for one term over the other when writing the essay.

33 According to Hedva, other sick women include, but are not limited to: “a black trans woman having panic attacks while using a public restroom, in fear of the violence awaiting her … the 50

child of parents whose indigenous histories have been erased, who suffers from the trauma of generations of colonization and violence … a 50-year-old gay man who was raped as a teenager and has remained silent and shamed, believing that men can’t be raped … a black man killed in police custody, and officially said to have severed his own spine. His name is Freddie Gray … the refugee … the abused child … the starving … the dying” (Section 5).

34 Donna Jackson Nakazawa notes how “recent studies conducted by the American Autoimmune Related Diseases Association reveal that 45 percent of patients with autoimmune diseases have been labeled hypochondriacs in the earliest stages of their illnesses. Some of this, no doubt, has to do with the fact that 75 percent to 80 percent of autoimmune disease sufferers are women” (30). Hypochondriac becomes code for hysterical as Carolyn Lazard points out. Women are thus labelled “psychosomatic maligners” (Nakazawa 30).

35 This movement began with the Disability Justice Collective, founded in 2005 by Patty Berne, Mia Mingus, Stacey Milbern, Leroy Moore, Eli Clare, and Sebastian Margaret. For more on the history of this movement, see Mia Mingus’s essay “Changing the Framework: Disability Justice”; E.T. Russian’s The Ring of Fire Anthology; and Alice Wong’s collection, Resistance and Hope: Essays by Disabled People.

36 See Patty Berne, “Skin, Tooth, and Bone—The Basis of Our Movement Is People: A Disability Justice Primer.”

37 For more on the Black Lives Matter movement see: Taylor; Maynard; Khan-Cullors and bandele; and Lowery.

38 The term “bare life” comes from Giorgio Agamben’s text Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. The status of bare life denotes those subjects that the state keeps alive, but just barely.

39 Piepzna-Samarasinha argues for a similar definition of interdependence. Noting the ways in which emotional labour is all too often performed by femmes or feminine people, Piepzna- Samarsinha goes on to propose “the radical notion that providing care is work” that “is essential to building movements that are accessible and sustainable” (141). She’ll go on to outline seven tenets of a fair trade emotional labour economy, including a shared belief that care is reciprocal. 51

But reciprocity isn’t necessarily a fifty-fifty trade: “In disabled communities, we talk about the idea that we can still offer reciprocity to each other, even if we can’t offer the exact same type of care back … if my disabled body can’t lift yours onto the toilet, it doesn’t mean I can’t be reciprocal—it means I contribute equally from what my particular body can do” (146-7). We’re not here to tally up the number of hours spent on an act of care so that we can compare it to how many hours we’ve put in.

40 See pages 42-7 for an account of Loree Erickson’s care collective and pages 60-3 for Piepzna- Samarasinha’s description of SDQ. These are just two of four different examples that she offers of care webs. Piepzna-Samarasinha also discusses Creating Collective Access Detroit (47-52); “the crash-and-burn emergency model” that gets created when an otherwise able-bodied person experiences temporary disability (52-54); and Creating Collective Access Bay Area (54-60). 52

Chapter 2 Pregnant, Hysterical, Sick: the Teen Pregnancy Endemic

In the Wake of the COVID-19 Pandemic

I wrote this chapter in 2018 and am now revising it in the spring of 2020: in the midst of the global COVID-19 pandemic. To be thinking through the teen pregnancy epidemic while living in a pandemic is an eerie undertaking, but one that I feel called to think through. At first glance, the connection between COVID-19 and teen pregnancy might not feel obvious. But what I hope to show is how the need to control the spread of this pandemic has enabled other forms of biopolitical control to go largely unnoticed. The need to regulate bodies for “public safety,” always results in additional forms of bodily regulation that serve those in power.

Starting March 11th 2020, when the World Health Organization declared a pandemic, states across the US quickly banned abortions, declaring them a non-essential service.1 Throughout March and April, abortion services were on and off as the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA), the Center for Reproductive Rights, and the Lawyering Project, amongst others, filed suits against the states of Arkansas, Alabama, Iowa, Louisiana, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, and West Virginia, where temporary restraining orders were granted by federal judges only to be overturned by the US Court of Appeals.2 As of May 1st, Planned Parenthood reported that “the governors in almost all of these states lifted the executive orders they had used to ban abortion and replaced them with different rules,” and that “the pandemic- era abortion bans in all nine states where lawsuits were filed” are no longer in effect.

With the closure of abortion clinics, accessing abortion was only possible for those with class privilege. In a large state like Texas, banning access to abortion services meant driving across state lines. Laurie Sobel et al. report how, for someone living in Texas,

The next closest clinic she could have potentially gone to is in Shreveport, Louisiana, 585 miles away. Louisiana has a mandatory waiting period of 24 hours, so it would have taken her at least 9 hours to drive there, she would have had to wait 24 hours before getting an abortion, and then drive 9 hours home — a 2 to 3 day trip. If she wanted to go to a clinic in a state without a waiting period, she would have had to drive 803 miles to the nearest clinic

53

in New Mexico. This would have been a 12-hour drive and she may have been able to get an abortion the next day, but this would likely also be a 2 to 3 day trip, driving full days.3

In addition to the financial burden of such a trip, and the emotional and psychological strain it would cause, those traveling to seek abortion would be opening themselves up to contracting COVID-19 at each gas station, rest stop, and motel. Being forced to seek an abortion across state lines would actually increase the possibility of contracting and spreading the virus. This begs the question: why would policy makers promote a ban that would, in effect, have the opposite effect of their stated aim?

To answer this question, it helps to look at which states swiftly moved to promote the abortion bans. It isn’t shocking that, as the ACLU highlights, “The states that have moved to restrict access to abortion during the pandemic are among those which have passed some of the harshest anti-abortion laws in the country in recent years.” For Ashoka Mukpo, staff reporter at the ACLU, “The court battle highlights a new frontier the COVID-19 crisis has created in the fight over reproductive rights: Against the advice of public health experts, some states in the South and Midwest are trying to use the pandemic as a cover to ban abortion.” The abortion bans highlight how sickness is being used as a smokescreen: under the guise of paternalistic care, the state punishes those exercising their reproductive rights. By leveraging the current pandemic, states are actually making certain bodies sicker whilst apparently keeping other bodies – namely, white bodies – free of the virus.

It’s important to remember, as Nirmala Erevelles points out that, “the problem with the terms ‘epidemic’ and ‘endemic’” – and I would add pandemic to this list – “is that they are usually deployed via nation-state/transnational practices to mark some bodies as pathological and therefore dangerous to other bodies” (75). In the case of abortion bans during COVID-19, it is those seeking abortions that are positioned – both literally and figuratively – as “pathological and therefore dangerous” vis-à-vis the state. It is this link between sickness and reproduction that I explore in this chapter by looking at those who are disproportionately impacted by the state’s reproductive rights laws: teen moms of colour.

At the same time as I acknowledge the ways in which these abortion bans impact those assigned female at birth, I also want to address how COVID-19 is a virus that has hit communities of 54 colour at disproportionately higher rates than white communities.4 Thus I wish to speak to the “racial pandemic within the viral pandemic” to borrow Ibrai X. Kendi’s words. This racial pandemic has been well documented. The Chicago Tribune reports: “Black Chicagoans are dying at nearly six times the rate of white residents. Despite the fact that African Americans make up 30% of the population, Reyes et al report that 68% of COVID-19 deaths are Black individuals. In New York City, 62% of deaths from COVID were Black and Hispanic people, “despite them representing just 51% of the population.”5 Additionally, Black people are twice as likely to die from the virus as white people.6 The same disparity can be found in the American South. ABC News reports that, “In Mississippi, the state with the country's largest black population, African Americans comprise 37% of the population but account for 52% of deaths from COVID-19.”7 While in Louisiana, more than 70% of those who’ve died from COVID are Black, but only 32% of the state’s population is Black.8 According to the APM Research Lab, across the United States, “Black Americans continue to experience the highest overall actual COVID-19 mortality rates— about 2.3 times as high as the rate for Whites and Asians, who have the lowest actual rates.”

Dr. Lisa A. Cooper, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Medicine addresses some of the reasons for this racial disparity in COVID- 19 deaths:

Existing racial disparities in the rates of chronic medical conditions increase the risk among ethnic minorities for serious complications of the novel coronavirus and resulting higher death rates. Additionally, the observed disparities in how the disease affects racial/ethnic minority populations highlight inequities in socio-economic status, living conditions, and access to care in the U.S. […] Ethnic minorities are also more likely to be exposed to infection while working, due to their overrepresentation in essential jobs in transportation, government, health care, and food supply services, and in low wage or temporary jobs that may not allow telework or provide paid sick leave.

The story of racial disparity within medicine is nothing new. As I’ll show later in this chapter, there is a long history of Black suffering and death within the field of medicine, and more specifically, within Black reproductive health. 55

While we have yet to see any information on or interest in how the COVID-19 pandemic is impacting pregnant teenagers, and pregnant teens of colour in particular, it is clear that this demographic will be deeply impacted by both the abortion bans. I begin this chapter by talking about COVID-19 because it serves to reflect the ways in which the state works to kill Black communities and control reproductive bodies via medical discourse. Moreover, COVID-19 has revealed what the Black community has known for a long time: that anti-Black racism is its own pandemic created and enforced by the state.

In what follows, I argue that the myth of the teen pregnancy epidemic works to cover over the ways in which the state has created a teen pregnancy endemic within poor Black communities. I’ll unpack how the language of “epidemic” works to frame teen pregnancy and teen motherhood as a sickness in need of a cure. This perception of the Black teen mom, I argue, is informed by the history of pathologizing and experimenting on Black people. Using a sick theories lens, I’ll demonstrate how thinking about pregnant teens and teen moms of colour through sick theories reveals another dimension of state-sanctioned anti-Black violence. And, at the same time, we’ll see how teen moms of colour are imagining – both fictionally and literally – forms of redress that center community care and demonstrate how, to use the words of Jennifer Nash and Patricia Hill Collins, “practices of ‘community-mothering’ are life-restoring acts” (557) that are radical alternatives to state forms of care.9

There is significant scholarship focused on the medicalized violence and harm that Black mothers have experienced and are still experiencing today, but what’s missing from these analyses is a focused discussion of the figure of the pregnant teen and teen mom.10 Building on work done in the fields of critical race studies, disability studies, animal studies, and queer studies through the lens of sick theories, I demonstrate how it is the case that the very systems that are supposed to support teen girls work place them in a state of debility. Like the hysterics that I discuss throughout this dissertation, and the Black women that I discuss here, teen moms are pathologized and positioned as sick bodies in need of the paternalistic care of the state.11

After discussing the endemic of sick mothers, I’ll place cultural, political, educational, and literary objects into conversation to demonstrate how the tragedies that attach themselves to teen moms come not from their pregnancy and birth of their children. Rather, it’s the toxic narratives 56 of state paternalism, racism, and ableism that make it difficult, and sometimes impossible to flourish. The state’s refusal to implement comprehensive sex education, enable easy access to abortion and contraception, and invest in greater economic opportunities for those living in the rural south are the root causes of the teen pregnancy endemic. It is not the sick girl, figured as the pregnant teen/teen mom of colour that needs a cure; rather, it’s the world she’s forced to live in.

After refuting the framing of teen pregnancy as an epidemic, I turn to Jesmyn Ward’s award- winning novel Salvage the Bones (2011). Ward’s novel offers a story of teen pregnancy that refuses the common tropes. In my reading of Salvage the Bones, I look at how the text’s pregnant teen, a fifteen-year old Black girl named Esch, explores her relationship to a variety of sick, unruly, and hysterical mothers: Medea of Greek myth, her brother’s pit bull China, her dead mother, and Hurricane Katrina. What draws Esch towards each of these mothers is her ability to recognize that the conditions that Black families are born into are often violent and bleak – but filled with possibility. In other words, Esch is drawn towards mothers like herself: girls and women, animals and nature, ghosts and myths, who’re all trying to figure out how to survive in a world that pathologizes them. Esch’s pregnancy enables her to create hysterical intimacies between the human and non-human, mythical and real, dead and the living. I want us to move away from the story that teen pregnancy is an epidemic in need of a cure (the cure, of course, being abstinence-only education and the shaming tactics it espouses) and focus our attention on how we might better care for those girls who find themselves becoming mothers.

When we look at Ward’s novel through the lens of sick theories, we can see how the text provides a model for community care that enables the pregnant teen and teen mom to reject the logic of pathologization and cure. Instead, she’s giving the opportunity to celebrate the different ways that our bodyminds, to borrow Sami Schalk’s phrase, enable us to dream up better worlds, filled with the care that we all deserve. While the state works to take away the autonomy of these girls, erasing her accomplishments and placing new barriers in her way, the pregnant teenager is reimagining new systems of care that reject the ableist and neoliberal idealization of the individual. In the final section of this chapter, I show how the community created within Salvage the Bones pushes back against the neoliberal emphasis on the individual and the conservative argument that abstinence-only sex education will be the solution to this epidemic. 57

The Endemic of Sick Mothers

The medicalization and pathologization of Black bodies has a long history, going back to at least the eighteenth century with experimentation on Southern plantation slaves.12 For Black women in particular, this history of experimentation is inextricably linked to their sexuality. In the 1830s, Black slave women became the subjects of medical experimentation in the United States. From 1845-1849, gynecologist J. Marion Sims performed over thirty surgeries on one young Black woman named Anarcha, as well as eleven others. Sims’s cause was, at face value, a noble one: he wanted to find a cure for vesicovaginal fistula, a condition that impacts women who’ve had difficult childbirths. But his surgical methods were cruel. Despite the invention of anaesthesia in 1846, Sims performed his surgeries without it. Harriet A. Washington explains:

Medical journals and professional word of mouth had detailed the inhalation of ether as anaesthesia since the early 1840s, and Sims knew of this, but he flatly refused to administer anaesthesia to the slave women and girls. He claimed that his procedures were “not painful enough to justify the trouble and risk attending the administration” but this claim rings hollow when one learns that Sims always administered anaesthesia when he performed the perfected surgery to repair the vaginas of white women in Montgomery a few years later. (65)

Sims’ decision to not administer painkillers reflected the common belief that Black people did not experience pain or anxiety nearly as much as white people.13 Through his experiments on Black women, Sims perfected vesiocovaginal fistula repair operations, and he became the celebrated “father of American gynecology,” with a statue in New York City’s Central Park that remained there until 2018.14

This was not the last time that Black women’s sexual health was the site of medical experimentation. In the 1930s, forced sterilization was encouraged for those who were deemed “mentally unfit,” and “by 1941, sterilization had been forced upon 70,000 to 100,000 Americans” (Washington 203).15 Michel Desjardins outlines how medicine and social science justified sterilization vis-à-vis two different classifications: one passive and another active. Desjardins explains: “Some of the ‘feebleminded’ were held to be too vulnerable to resist the advances of the unruly; by contrast, others were held to be insatiable sexual predators” (70). 58

While Desjardins’s study lacks an analysis of race, in Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty, Dorothy Roberts notes that 50% of the estimated 100,000 to 150,000 sterilization cases were performed on Black girls and women (93). This ratio reveals how it was Black sexuality in particular that was framed as a sick body in need of medical intervention.

Eventually doctors could do away with this justification of mental unfitness. Forced sterilization continued throughout the 1960s and 70s: Black women were sterilized without their knowledge and, therefore, without their consent. In 1961, Fannie Lou Hamer walked into a hospital in rural Mississippi to have a benign uterine fibroid removed. During the procedure, the surgeon also removed her uterus, rendering Hamer sterile. The dark irony of Hamer’s case and others like her is that doctors were rendering Black women disabled by making them infertile. This procedure became so common that it was referred to as a “Mississippi appendectomy.” At the heart of these experimentations and violations was the belief, grounded in eugenics, that Black women were biologically unfit to be mothers and would only give birth to defective children.16 Roberts chronicles how doctors justified sterilizations on the grounds that Black girls were destined to go on welfare. The sterilizations were framed as a public service.17 This logic points to the ways that policymakers worked to divert attention away from the “political, social, and economic forces that maintain America’s racial order” (Roberts 102). The history of controlling Black women’s reproductive rights is alive and well – we can see how this legacy impacts how Black teen moms are treated today.

Ellen Samuels provides a useful framework for bringing the history of medical experimentation into conversation with contemporary attempts to control the bodies of Black girls. In Fantasies of Identification: Disability, Gender, Race, Samuels describes how in the mid-nineteenth- century, America began intense efforts to define, categorize, and medicalize bodies marked as other. These efforts resulted in what she calls the “fantasy of identification.” Samuels’ framework is especially useful, given that, as she compellingly argues, “fantasies of identification are haunted by disability even when disabled bodies are not their immediate focus, for disability functions as the trope and embodiment of true physical difference” (3). Turning her attention to everything from birthmarks and fingerprints to wheelchair parking passes, Samuels argues that fantasies of identification not only seek to define and categorize those based on race, 59 gender, and ability, they do so through “the biological mark of identity” (2). But, as Samuels points out in the same breath, while they work to “consolidate the authority of medicine,” in practice, fantasies of identification “often exceed or contradict any actual scientific basis” (3). I argue that the stigmatization of teen pregnancy and motherhood is another fantasy of identification. Propped up by false statistics and culturally accepted myths, the teen mom is framed as a failure, as someone who will never achieve success, and just another statistic of the teen pregnancy epidemic.

The myth of the teen pregnancy epidemic began in 1976, when the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a Planned Parenthood research initiative, published a booklet entitled 11 Million Teenagers: What Can Be Done about the Epidemic of Adolescent Pregnancies in the United States. At this point in time, Planned Parenthood had been advocating for teenagers to have access to sex education and contraception, a proposal that was later staunchly rejected by the Reagan administration.18 Ironically, Jenna Vinson points out, it was Planned Parenthood and family planning advocates that “positioned teenage pregnancy as a national problem” and a public health concern warranting a classification of epidemic proportions (11).19 By the 1980s, teen motherhood became synonymous with the Black welfare mother and was constructed as an epidemic associated with poverty, immorality, and promiscuity” (Erdmans and Black 20).20

Defined as a widespread occurrence of an infectious disease in a community at a particular time, the word epidemic conjures up the fear that comes with contagious diseases such as HIV, SARS, and COVID-19. In her book, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative, Priscilla Wald draws on the work of Michel Foucault to point out “that the concept of public health was formative for modern society, and epidemics were important because they manifested the need for protection in the form of regimented social behavior” (18). One of Wald’s aims is to “understand the appeal and the consequences of stories about disease outbreaks and disease emergence generally” (28). Like Wald, I’m also curious about the appeal of the language of the “epidemic” – as this appeal could help explain why it is the case that, despite the massive decline in teen pregnancy and birth rates over the last few decades, the teen pregnancy epidemic retains its cultural efficacy. 60

In the 21st century, the myth of the teen pregnancy epidemic retains its potency because epidemics are racialized. Wald takes great care cataloguing how racialized subjects are framed as the carriers of some of the most devastating outbreaks. In her discussion of contagious diseases, Wald argues that, “the outbreak narrative… follows a formulaic plot that begins with the identification of an emerging infection, includes discussion of the global networks throughout which it travels, and chronicles the epidemiological work that ends with its containment” (2, emphasis mine). Wald describes how ethnic and racialized others all too often become national scapegoats for the transmission of contagious diseases. As Wald notes, this includes Mary Mallon, an Irish immigrant who became known as “Typhoid Mary” in the early twentieth century (69-113), the immigrants occupying tenement houses in America in the nineteenth century (114-156), and the Singaporean flight attendant who was one of the people blamed for spreading SARS in the early 2000s (16-24).

Nayan Shah’s Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown offers another example of the racialization of epidemics. Shah documents the racialization of the smallpox epidemic throughout the 1860s and into the 1880s in San Francisco’s Chinatown, and the anti-Chinese racism that emerged as a result. This anti-racist sentiment has emerged once again with the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in rural China and began to spread in December 2019. Robin Gill at Global News reports that, “Asian communities across Canada report rising racist behaviour during COVID-19 crisis,” with the Vancouver Police Department noting a “600 per cent increase in reports of hate crimes targeting the Asian community, whether they’re of Chinese, Korean or Japanese descent.” In the US, the president himself referred to the virus as “the China virus,” thus continuing to enforce anti-Asian racism.21

Even outside of the confines of outbreaks and epidemics, Wald notes elsewhere how the language of contamination is used when discussing the bodies of Black women. At the 2012 American Studies Association, Wald told the story of how Henrietta Lacks’s cells became famous after her death in 1951. Doctors discovered that Lacks’s cells – which they’d go on to name HeLa cells – contained a new cell line that would enable unprecedented scientific developments, including the creation of a polo vaccine and research on diseases such as HIV. But not everyone was ready to celebrate the HeLa cells. Wald notes how journalists described Lacks’s cells as “‘the enemy within… contaminating every other cell [line] in America’” (198). 61

Wald quotes another journalist who describes the HeLa cells as “‘a monster amidst the Pyrex’” before going on to explain that the source of the HeLa cells “‘had been black and female’” (198). These descriptions reveal how the HeLa cells were framed as “an insidious, conniving, promiscuous African American woman,” who “defies control” (199). Here we can see how epidemic becomes a useful metaphor. Lacks’s cells were framed as an unruly body set to infect anything and everything she comes into contact with. It is this logic that informs the treatment of teen pregnancy in America, and, more specifically, the treatment of Black teen moms.

When we recognize that teen pregnancy is no longer an epidemic, the question we must ask is: why is the state so invested in continuing to proclaim that it is? It is here that a shift from epidemics to endemics is useful. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) defines endemic as “the constant presence and/or usual prevalence of a disease or infectious agent in a population within a geographic area,” while an epidemic marks “an increase, often sudden, in the number of cases of a disease above what is normally expected in that population in that area.”22 What the CDC does not note is the ways in which epidemics are framed as coming from elsewhere and are blamed on an individual, whereas endemics come from within. Thus a systemic analysis is needed.

In The Right to Maim, Jasbir K. Puar offers a framework for understanding the endemic, and the deaths of Black people in particular, through her theorization of “a biopolitics of debilitation” (xiii). Debilitation marks, for Puar, “a practice of rendering populations available for statistically likely injury” (xviii) and is thus not the same thing as disability. Puar explains:

I contend that the term ‘debilitation’ is distinct from the term ‘disablement’ because it foregrounds the slow wearing down of populations instead of the event of becoming disabled. While the latter concept creates and hinges on a narrative of before and after for individuals who will eventually be identified as disabled, the former comprehends those bodies that are sustained in a perpetual state of debilitation precisely through foreclosing the social, cultural, and political translation to disability. (xiii-xiv)

In other words, those subject to a biopolitics of debilitation would not register as disabled in the same way that a person in a wheelchair would. While those read as disabled “tend toward impairments that are thought to be discernible,” those who’ve been debilitated include those with 62

“cognitive and intellectual disability, chronic pain conditions like fibromyalgia or migraines, and depression” (xix). This lack of legibility is precisely what the state wants, for as long as those who’ve been debilitated remain invisible, the state can continue to keep them forever pinned in a state of debility. Thus it is the case that “depending on where we live, what resources we have, what traumas we have endured, what color our skin is, what access we have to clean water, air, and decent food, what type of health care we have, what kind of work we do…we will not all be disabled” (xiv). Instead, “some of us will simply not live long enough, embedded in a distribution of risk already factored into the calculus of debilitation. Death’s position” (xiv). “Debilitation,” Puar thus argues, “is not a by-product of the operation of biopolitics but an intended result” (xvii).

If we think about Puar’s framing of debilitation in relation to the pregnant teen and teen mom of colour, we can see how these figures are not disabled so much as they are debilitated by the racial and socio-economic inequalities that keep them not only living below the poverty line, but in a position in which having a child becomes a means of survival in a world where poverty is all too common. Puar’s theory of debility is similar to Lauren Berlant’s theorization of “slow death,” which is “a condition of being worn out by the activity of reproducing life,” (759). I can’t help but pause at Berlant’s phrasing here, which we can take quite literally when it comes to thinking about the ways in which the act of reproducing life is inextricably linked to debility.

Debility becomes useful for addressing the teen pregnancy endemic precisely because, as Puar explains: “Debility addresses injury and bodily exclusion that are endemic rather than epidemic or exceptional, and reflects a need for rethinking overarching structures of working, schooling, and living rather than relying on rights frames to provide accommodationist solutions” (xvii). As I’ve been arguing, the teen pregnancy epidemic is actually an endemic precisely because there is nothing exceptional about it. When we begin to think about teen pregnancy through the lens of debilitation and endemic, we can begin to see the state’s investment in continuing rather than preventing teen pregnancy from happening.

Recalling Lauren Berlant’s claim that “nations provoke fantasy” (1; 1991), I want to now offer a critique of the state’s claim that in order to prevent teen pregnancy, policymakers must focus their attention on the individual – and their sick desires – and propose instead that we need to 63 focus on the systemic inequalities that meet at the intersections of race, class, gender, and ability, and that undergird the high rates of teen pregnancy among girls of color. What might happen, I wonder, if we pushed back against the narrative that teen pregnancy is a tragedy to see the stories that the state tries to erase?

After analyzing the ways that teen pregnancy is framed as a spectacle or a tragedy, I propose that there is a third framing of teen pregnancy that we must be attuned to: teen pregnancy as sickness. Turning to disability studies, I flesh out the similarities between the discourse used to discuss teen moms, on the one hand, and those who are disabled, on the other. This includes the fear that both subjects will be dependent on the state for economic security, as well as the belief that neither will have the same capacity to go on to achieve neoliberal markers of success, including post-secondary education. Disability studies provides a necessary framework for thinking about the pregnant teen girl, but it needs a sick theories twist if we want to reveal the ways in which the state actively creates the myth of epidemic to cover over an endemic.

National Narratives

In 2009, MTV premiered the first episode of its new documentary series 16 and Pregnant. Over two million viewers tuned in to watch six teen girls navigate their lives in the wake of the news that they were pregnant. A first of its kind in reality television, the show stayed with the teens through the months of their pregnancy and ended shortly after the births of their children. Lauren Dolgen, senior vice president of the MTV series, explained how the series and its spinoffs are meant to be “cautionary tales about the consequences of unprotected sex, and the reality of becoming a parent too early.” But critics were quick to express their incredulity about this new venture in reality television, arguing that the shows did not offer an honest depiction of teen pregnancy and that the show glamorizes being a teen mom.23 Others wondered about the lives of these teenagers once they became parents – and so MTV responded with the spin-offs Teen Mom and Teen Mom 2, returning to four of the six girls featured in past seasons of 16 and Pregnant.24 The show’s most recent incarnation, Teen Mom: Young and Pregnant, which premiered in November 2018, focuses on the time leading up to and after the birth of the children. After a short break, the show has returned to document the first birthdays of the babies. 64

The emergence of this series within American television is significant. Out of all of the developed countries, the United States has the highest rate of teen births. In 2015, the CDC reported that within the United States, approximately twenty-two births occurred in every one thousand girls between the ages of fifteen to nineteen.25 Given the role that media plays on impacting the behaviors of teenagers, scholars and researchers have conducted studies to gauge the show’s impact on teen pregnancy rates and teen births in America. The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy attributed a 9% drop in teen pregnancy rates in 2009 to the premiere of the show.26 James Dinh of MTV News purports that, according to National Campaign’s report, 82% of teenagers credited 16 and Pregnant for helping them better understand the challenges that come with being a teen parent. Melissa Kearney and Phillip Levine found a similar correlation between dropping rates of teen pregnancy and the popularity of 16 and Pregnant in their 2015 study. Based on their analysis of Google Trends and Twitter data, as well as MTV ratings, the study concluded that 16 and Pregnant led to a 4.3% decrease in teen births and an increased interest in contraceptive use and abortion (3599).

But these findings are at odds with other studies, which demonstrate that 16 and Pregnant might unintentionally encourage teen pregnancy. In a study from 2014, researchers found that the teen girls who watch the show “were less likely to perceive themselves at risk for pregnancy and more likely to believe that the benefits of teen pregnancy outweigh risks” (Aubrey et al 1156). This is due, in part, to the fact that the show sends mixed signals about the consequences of becoming a teen mom. While there are certainly hardships, the teens featured in the show continue to reiterate that the positives of having a child (like the bond between mother and child) outweigh the challenges. In a follow up to this study, published in 2017, researchers looked at the impact of positive and negative role models on teen girls’ perceptions of the myths of teen childbearing. They found that viewers who felt affinity toward “the negative role model” – i.e. the teen mother – “may come to the interpretation that the consequences of her behavior are not so negative after all” (Behm-Morawitz et al 188). Interestingly, these findings are at odds with the usual trend in entertainment education, in which viewers distance themselves from negative role models and perceive their actions as undesirable (188). Behm-Morawitz et al conclude, then, that the shows have failed in their aim to discourage teen pregnancy. 65

I can’t help but wonder if these findings are a marker of the show’s failing. How might these findings reflect the ability of teen girls to see that the cultural myths of teen pregnancy – namely, that it will result in tragedy – are simply not accurate? Rather than necessarily encouraging teen pregnancy – as though seeing positive representations will lead all teen girls to go out and get pregnant – what if these findings reveal that the teen girl is able to hold a more nuanced understanding of what it means to be a teen mom than otherwise available to her? While the series positions teen moms as an object for public consumption, one that should promote aversion and refusal, the teen girls watching the show refuse such a positioning, and opt instead to find ways to connect with a figure that has long been the site of stigmatization and contempt.

While MTV might be inadvertently promoting a more nuanced representation of teen motherhood, activists such as Natasha Vianna are working to shift the cultural perception much more intentionally. In 2014, Vianna, one of the founders of the #NoTeenShame, a social media movement working to de-stigmatize teen motherhood, gave a TedX talk entitled “Changing the meaning of teenage motherhood.” Vianna became pregnant when she was seventeen, and she describes how this change in her identity dramatically shifted how others perceived her:

I remember starting my senior year of high school and looking at my class schedule and realizing that I was no longer in honor’s classes. So I went over to my guidance counselor’s office and I said, “Excuse me, I think there’s a mistake. I’m not in honor’s anymore.” […] She looked up and looked back down and said, “Oh honey, teen moms don’t stay in honors.” […] I knocked back on her door a few months later and said, “Excuse me, can you help me fill out this college application?” Again, not even making eye contact, not even acknowledging that I was in the room, she said, “Oh honey, let’s see if you can even graduate first.” Then I went back to my class, big belly, crying, upset. My teacher points to me, in front of the class, “This is what happens when you’re irresponsible.” That’s what teen moms have to deal with these days.

Vianna’s story is not exceptional; it is the norm.27 As Vianna notes, “In this culture, being a teen mom means you don’t finish high school; being a teen mom means you don’t go to college; being a teen mom means your boyfriend leaves you; being a teen mom means your child won’t succeed; that you won’t get a good job; and god forbid, you’ll never enjoy being a mother.” 66

Amanda, a teen mom who was part of Joanna Gregson’s 2009 study in The Culture of Teenage Mothers, describes the media perception of teen mothers as similarly negative: “Being a bad parent. Being a slut. Giving their kids to their parents to raise. Being irresponsible. Not being able to give love or teach love” (137). What is clear in both of these examples is that teen pregnancy is framed as an individual failing.

These culturally accepted narratives of teen pregnancy are persistent and ubiquitous. In the 2013 “Real Cost” campaign on teen pregnancy, posters appeared in bus stops all over New York City. Launched by the New York City Human Resources Administration, under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the campaign was meant to “promote the difficulties of teen pregnancy, and why it is better to wait until you are a financially stable adult in a committed relationship to have children” (New York City Human Resources Administration). Unsurprisingly, the campaign framed teen pregnancy and motherhood as a tragedy for both mother and child. In one image, there is a curly-haired baby with sad eyes and tears running down his cheeks. The caption next to him reads: “I’m twice as likely not to graduate high school because you had me as a teen.” In another post, a young girl of color is speaking to her mother: “Honestly Mom… chances are he won’t stay with you. What happens to me?” It is important to note that in three out of four images (with the fifth being a composite), the child pictured is not white.28

These images sparked outrage from Planned Parenthood, who noted how the poster campaign failed to talk about the racial, economic, and social factors that contribute to teenage pregnancy.29 Haydee Morales, Vice President for Education and Training at Planned Parenthood of New York City explained how “It’s not teen pregnancy that causes poverty. It’s poverty that causes teen pregnancy.” Morales statement reflects the findings of researchers. In their 2012 study, “Why is the Teen Birth Rate in the United States So High and Why Does it Matter?” Melissa Kearney and Phillip Levine note that “Girls who grow up in poverty or in a single-parent household are nearly twice as likely to have teen births as girls without these background disadvantage factors” (18-19).30 Kearney and Levine “speculate that the combination of being poor and living in a more unequal (and less mobile) society contributes to a low perception of possible economic success, and hence leads to choices that favour short-term satisfaction—in this case, the decision to have a baby when young and unmarried” (20). As Mary Patrice Edmans 67 and Timothy Black so succinctly put it: “structural inequality shapes [the] biography” of teen mothers (5). And, I would argue, it shapes the cultural perception of teen mothers as well.

In her analysis of the dominant imagery of teen pregnancy used in prevention campaigns, Jacqueline Daldin notes how these systemic issues go unacknowledged. For Daldin, these visual representations can be divided into two categories. The first is that teen pregnancy is an individual failure “and a ‘problem’ of public concern” (31). In their study, “Deviant (M)others: The Construction of Teenage Motherhood in Contemporary Discourse,” Helen Wilson and Annette Huntington provide one possible explanation for why, despite declining teen birth rates, teen pregnancy has been framed as both an individual failing, and a problem that should concern the public. Pregnant teens and teen moms are framed as problematic, they contend, because they choose a life that runs counter to a story of middle-class mobility and economic success (59). For policymakers, the solution to this problem, according to Daldin, is to promote a behavioural change at the level of the individual: “In all of the images, the teen mother or her experience is isolated, which further emphasizes the individual as an object for change. The teen mother is separated from the rest of her ‘story’ or personal narrative and is identified only as a teen mother and presented as a ‘case’ or problem to be solved” (32). We saw how this story impacted how Vianna was treated by her high school counselor, and how it has informed the New York City campaign, with statements that point the blame at the teen mother.

The second visual strategy that Daldin outlines is to present quantitative data, usually in the form of statistics, which is then positioned as the truth about teen pregnancy (36). Wilson and Huntington explain why quantitative data is privileged over qualitative data: “findings from qualitative inquiry,” offer countless stories of teen moms who are successful, and thus “are rarely cited in government documents or reports. This is not only because such studies may pose a challenge to the official orthodoxy regarding teenage mothers, but it also reflects a common perception that qualitative research is less rigorous and accurate” (65). But as I’ll show, not all quantitative data is privileged, nor is it always accurate. As Mary Patrice Erdmans and Timothy Black note, when it comes to the teen mother, it’s “not about the empirical reality, but about political and cultural constructions of teen motherhood” (16). Policy makers thus continue to disregard findings that are counter to the story they wish to tell: that we’re still dealing with a teen pregnancy epidemic. 68

What these shows and media campaigns highlight is a desire to cover over the systemic issues that are inextricably linked to high teen birth rates amongst teen girls of colour. And while policy makers are quick to speak of their desire to decrease teen birth rates, their failure to implement the kinds of programs and services that would support these decreases reveals that the real desire is to keep the teen mom of colour exactly where she is: trapped in a state of debility. Systemic oppression cannot be maintained without a subject to oppress. Thus the teen mom of colour is framed as the most undesirable subject position you could occupy, while at the same time being deeply desirable and necessary for maintaining the racial, gender, and class oppression.

Jesmyn Ward herself has noted that the teen mom occupies an ambivalent position in the nation state. In an interview with The Paris Review in 2011, Ward responds to Elizabeth Hoover’s observation that “we’re at this weird moment with teen moms. They are vilified and yet made into reality stars.” Ward agrees: “We are at a weird moment. Their popularity as reality stars rests on an assumption of morality and repugnance by the viewer. These young women are still spectacle.” Ward is referring to the MTV hit shows 16 and Pregnant, which ran from 2009 to 2014, and its spin off Teen Mom. Ward’s statement draws attention to the cultural ambivalence towards the pregnant teenager and teen mom. As she notes, the popularity of these shows depends on the negative affects they produce in those watch them. The repugnance the viewer feels only leaves them wanting more – for it is through the pregnant teenager that the viewer can enforce their moral superiority.31 For those who tune in week and after week, teen pregnancy becomes a spectacle that produces pleasure, as viewers distance themselves from the girls and women on screen.

Ward goes on to make a poignant observation about these shows, noting how “few of the girls on 16 and Pregnant and Teen Mom are black.” According to statistics, girls of color are three to four times more likely to become teen moms than girls who are white.32 Ward’s comment is supported by research on the show. In their 2016 study of the teen moms represented in the MTV series, Martins et al analyzed each episode in order to see if the mothers, fathers, and children were an accurate representation of the national statistics. They note how the typical teen mom living in the United States is between eighteen and nineteen years old, is non-white, and is not married at the time of birth (1549). The majority of these teen moms “rely on some form of government assistance to provide for themselves and their child” (1549). And yet, Martins et al 69 found that sixty-eight percent of the mothers on 16 and Pregnant and Teen Mom and Teen Mom 2 were white, against the national average of twenty-two percent, meaning that thirty-two percent of the teen moms in the show are non-white, whereas the national average of non-white teen mothers sits at seventy-eight percent (1550-52).33 Noting that teen girls of color have higher rates of teen pregnancy and birth than non-white teens, Martin et al argue that these shows are missing out on a vital opportunity to reach those most at risk (1554).

The absence of teen girls of colour in these series is notable. Ward provides one possible reason for this erasure of Black girls: “The figure of the black teen mother continues to loom large in our public consciousness, and we’re not willing to speak about the ethnic and class stereotypes associated with it because they’re still too useful to some.” In what follows, I argue that the “some” that Ward refers to are the white, neoliberal conservatives who continue to declare that abstinence-only sex education is the answer to what they call the “teen pregnancy epidemic.” But first I’ll turn to Ward’s Salvage the Bones. This novel offers a powerful intervention to the teen pregnancy narratives that I’ve outlined here. With her own mother long dead, Esch tries to answer the question, “Is this what motherhood is?” by turning to the various mother figures that surround her: her brother’s pit bull China, Medea, and Hurricane Katrina. As she tries to understand what it means to become a mother, Esch reimagines both her “sickness” and her environment as the site for a new collective of care made up of hysterical intimacies.

I’m not the first to see the lines of kinship between these four figures. Naomi Morgenstern argues that Esch’s relationship with Medea, China, and Katrina suggests a “posthumanist ontology (a touch of the divine, the animal, the weather) and of what it means to be taken to the edge of existence, to be radically exposed” (118). Morgenstern finds in these four mothers a sovereign maternity that challenges the “state of nature,” the “sites within the social—or at its apparent margins—where collective organization appears to break down… a place of extreme exposure and vulnerability and, potentially, the site of revolutionary renewal or reinvention” (105, 106). The vulnerability that Morgenstern speaks of is being a Black mother living in America.

But there is something particular about Esch’s motherhood that adds another layer of precarity to the already precarious life of the Black mother, that leaves her more “radically exposed” than 70 others: she will be a teen mom. It is from this particular subject position that I’d like to discuss Ward’s novel and what it reveals about the endemic of systemic anti-Black racism via the figure of the Black teen mother. Like Annie Bares, I turn to Salvage the Bones and see Puar’s concept of debility manifested in the pregnant Black girl. Bares draws attention to the ways in which Ward’s novel “demonstrates how racial capitalism and its attendant biopolitical logic create debilitated and debilitating environments through ruthless profit-seeking at the expense of both human and ecological well-being” (21). Salvage the Bones, Bares argues, and I agree, “refocuses attention to this unjust social order. By narrating its story of reproductive injustice from the perspective of Esch, Salvage the Bones flips the script on mainstream narratives of black motherhood, forcing readers to consider how political and economic systems produce pregnancy as a form of debility in certain populations and how reactionary cultural logics sustain debility” (27). While Bares claims cultural perceptions of teen pregnancy are equated with disability, I’d like to follow Puar’s call to distinguish between disability and debility, as discussed earlier in this chapter, and point to the ways in which teen pregnancy is framed as sickness. It is from the lens of sick theories that we can reveal how the teen pregnancy epidemic is actually an endemic produced and sustained by the state.

Sick Mothers; Hysterical Intimacies

Set in the coastal town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, Salvage the Bones focuses on a fifteen- year-old Black girl named Esch. Just twelve days before Hurricane Katrina hits, Esch finds out that she’s pregnant. She quickly understands that her options are limited:

I’ve heard girls at my school talk. These are conversations I snatch from the air like we take down clothes that have crusted dry on a clothesline. The girls say that if you’re pregnant and you take a month’s worth of birth control pills, it will make your period come on. Say if you drink bleach, you get sick, and it will make what will become the baby come out. Say if you hit yourself really hard in the stomach, throw yourself on the metal edge of a car and it hits you low enough to call bruises, it could bring a miscarriage. Say that this is what you do when you can’t afford an abortion, when you can’t have a baby, when nobody wants what is inside you. (102) 71

As Esch debates whether jumping on her dad’s “dump truck hood” could cause a miscarriage, she notes that getting an abortion isn’t the only impossibility: so is getting her hands on birth control. “Who would bring me?” Esch asks. “Daddy, who sometimes I think forgets that I’m a girl? Big Henry, one of the few of our friends who has a car? […] These are my options, and they narrow to none” (102-3). Just as quickly as Esch finds out that she’s pregnant, she accepts that she has no choice but to have this child. It is no great tragedy – it’s just a fact.

In the state of Mississippi there is just one abortion clinic, making it totally inaccessible to a poor rural girl like Esch. Not only is there a lack of access to abortion and birth control, but also access to sex education is limited. Up until 2011, Mississippi had no mandated sex education policy for schools. Now Mississippi schools have two options: abstinence-only or abstinence- plus education, and parents get to choose whether their kids will get to attend these classes. I will discuss this lack of access in greater detail in the final section of this chapter. What I’d like to highlight here is the ways in which Esch is left with limited and potentially deadly options, which “reify personal responsibility and restrict access to information about healthcare” (Bares 29). As Bares notes in her analysis of Salvage the Bones, “The novel’s ruthless presentation of these solutions forces readers to consider how stigma, and knowledge and access restrictions, coalesce in the curative imaginary to characterize certain pregnancies as problems to be solved in ways that produce debility among populations made already vulnerable by racialized poverty” (29).

Esch knows that her fate, as a Black girl in the American South, is to become a teen mother. And while she accepts this fate, she challenges the story that she must raise her child on her own. Salvage the Bones offers readers a reimagining of family and care that crosses species lines. Esch finds affinities with her brother’s dog, the mythical figure of Medea, and eventually Hurricane Katrina, and it is with these unruly mothers that Esch creates hysterical intimacies.

Esch comes to recognize that she has the ability to build a web of care that challenges the white, cisheteronormative family structure of one mother and one father. Instead, as her friend Big Henry tells her: “‘This baby got plenty daddies’” (255). Knowing that she’ll become a mother, Esch looks for a role model, someone who will help her understand what it means to occupy this new subject position. But with her mother long dead, Esch has to look elsewhere, and when she 72 does, she fosters hysterical intimacies with her brother’s pit bull, China, Medea of Greek Myth, and Hurricane Katrina.

The novel begins when China has just given birth to puppies and it is with the birth of the puppies that Esch realizes that “there is something there” in her stomach, marked by “a honeydew curve” (26, 88). Looking upon the scene of the puppies feeding from China, Esch becomes ill: “I run outside and crouch down and brace myself on my knees and throw up all over the red dirt, my hair falling forward like a black cloud” (26). Esch will go on to wonder: “Maybe it’s China that made me get it” (30). The fact that her brother’s dog is named China points to the ways in which sickness is framed as coming from an outsider. While we can presume that China gets her name because she is blindingly white, just like porcelain china, Esch describes this transference the way one would a contagious virus. By being in close proximity to China, Esch’s body becomes susceptible to pregnancy. Thus the sickness, here, is not a foreign disease; the sickness is pregnancy. Esch undoes the supposed veracity of the teen pregnancy epidemic by replacing it with a myth: that pregnancy might be transferred from nonhuman to human. In creating this connection between herself and her brother’s dog, we can see Esch’s desire to reimagine what Mel Chen refers to as an “intersubjective exchange” between human and animal (11). China becomes an active agent, one capable of giving as much as receiving.

In Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect, Chen defines animacy as “an often racialized and sexualized means of conceptual and affective mediation between human and inhuman, animate and inanimate” and argues that “matter that is considered insensate, immobile, deathly, or otherwise ‘wrong,’ animates cultural life in important ways” (10, 2). My interest in Chen’s articulation of animacy comes from their claim that “animacy has the capacity to rewrite conditions of intimacy, engendering different communalisms and revising political spheres” (3). Chen’s emphasis on the ways that animacy challenges the hierarchy in which man is more important than animal reveals how the logics of racism, misogyny, and ableism undergird this hierarchy.

Animacy is a useful theory for helping us think about Esch’s relationship to China vis-à-vis reproductive control. Chen traces the history of both human and animal reproduction in the country of China, prompting us to consider how the reproductive control of humans and of pets 73 can be read as a form of biopolitical management with racialized and sexualized overtones. Chen goes on to describe how welfare mothers are another figure, both sexualized and racialized, that is in need of control by state bodies: “Constructed as racialized wards of the state, misbehaving, nonproductive creatures who bear their own inordinately larger litters and who are destructive to heteronormative family models because they are sexually rampant” (134). Thus Chen draws attention to the ways that Black mothers are likened to dogs in need of neutering.

I want to expand Chen’s analysis to discuss how a similar regime of biopolitical management can be found in the treatment of pregnant Black teenagers and pit bulls. Both figures are reviled and framed as dangerous: the pregnant Black teenager is a threat to the public good because of the belief that she’ll drain the welfare system; and pit bulls are viewed as the most dangerous of dogs, with many states banning pit bull ownership.34 Breed profiling is an accepted practice of pit bull management, which evokes the longer history of racial profiling in the United States. Just as pit bulls are put down when they are seen to have acted out, so too do police and law makers justify shooting and killing unarmed Black men, women, and children who they perceive as being a violent threat. While it might not make sense to use the term “racist” to describe the profiling of pit bulls, the ties to the racialized oppression and justified deaths of so many Black bodies in the United States – both past and present – marks how racial profiling has crossed species lines to justify breed-specific laws banning pit bulls and the high rates of euthanization that occur as a result.

Harlan Weaver continues to flesh out the linkages between Black subjects and pit bulls. In his essay, “Pit Bull Promises: Inhuman Intimacies and Queer Kinships in Animal Shelters,” Weaver looks at the public mourning rituals that occurred after the deaths of Trayvon Martin and the execution of the pit bull, Lennox, in Belfast: “Immediately after the announcement of Lennox’s euthanasia, humans and their dogs across the Internet posted photos. Their captions? ‘I am Lennox’” (346). As Weaver notes, these captions deliberately evoke the memes that emerged after Martin’s death, which read, “I am Trayvon Martin.” I agree with Weaver’s claim that “In deliberately evoking this meme, the ‘I am Lennox’ campaign sought to bring the ‘like race’ logic of understandings of pit bull profiling into a ‘like race’ affective politics” through the public mourning rituals (346). Weaver’s example illuminates how in the same moment that Lennox is 74 marked as a body worth grieving, thus challenging the human/nonhuman hierarchy, Martin’s life is devalued, brought down to the level of the nonhuman.

Returning to Salvage the Bones, we can see how, as Christopher Lloyd argues, “Esch and China together, make each other up, reflecting and mirroring one another’s throwaway existence” (255). Lloyd never says what it is about Esch that marks her as a “throwaway body,” a term borrowed from Patricia Yaeger’s text Dirt and Desire. I’d argue that it’s Esch’s status as a pregnant Black teenager that marks her, like the pit bull, as disposable. But Ward refuses the ways that the pregnant Black teenager and pit bulls are positioned as threats to the nation, more broadly, and the sacred space of the nuclear family home. Salvage the Bones is invested in revealing how it is not the individual – human or nonhuman – that is dangerous; rather, it’s the very systems that produce them. Moreover, if we can disrupt this hierarchy and see how “Everything deserve to live” (Ward 213), we can begin to reimagine interspecies relationships as reciprocal relations filled with care. Thus I agree with Lloyd’s claim that “Salvage the Bones uses the particular racialized history of pit bulls to partly overturn racist assumptions and stereotypes, to intertwine species, and to rethink the boundaries of flesh” (261). And, I’d add, that in creating this kinship between Esch and China, Ward also calls on us to rethink the boundaries of intimacy and the supposed hierarchies between human and animal.

Esch witnesses the intimacy between man and dog in her brother Skeetah’s relationship with China. China is not positioned in the narrative as lower than Esch, but as a figure that can teach her something about what motherhood might look like. In this way, Ward revises biopolitical spheres – to borrow Chen’s phrasing (3) – in order to blur the boundaries between human and animal. Put another way, and borrowing again from Chen’s language, we can read the relationship between China and Esch as an exception “to the conventional ordering of sex, reproduction, and intimacy” (11) and thus deeply queer in its rejection of the human/nonhuman divide. Esch and China are one foundational relation in Ward’s reimagining of the communal.35

Esch not only compares herself to China, but she compares China to another mother figure: Greek mythology’s Medea. When China kills one of her puppies, Esch describes China as being as “bloody-mouthed and bright-eyed,” as Medea (130). In Greek mythology, Medea is famous for murdering her own children. In Euripides’s telling, Medea accompanies Jason on his quest 75 for the Golden Fleece that is currently in the possession of her father. Obtaining the Golden Fleece, a symbol of authority and kinship, would enable Jason to obtain his rightful spot on the throne. But without the help of Medea’s magic, and her decision to kill her own brother, it would not have been possible for Jason to secure the Golden Fleece. After the quest is over, Jason marries Creon’s daughter and Medea is overcome with grief. For Jason, the marriage is an advantageous one, as it will enable their two children to be linked to royalty (15). But for Medea it is a betrayal of their marriage and their kinship. Jason’s actions serve as the catalyst for Medea’s act of infanticide: killing their twins and refusing Jason’s request to bury them, Medea rides off with her dead children tied to the back of her horse-drawn chariot.

But this isn’t the only story. In Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty, Jacqueline Rose explains how “In other versions of the tale, in circulation before Euripedes, Medea does not murder children: hatred of Medea drives the Corinthians to kill them, or else the relatives of Creon kill them in revenge after she has murdered Creon and fled to Athens, or she puts her children through a rite designed to make them immortal, during the course of which they die” (68). Returning to Euripedes’ tale, Rose notes that Medea is driven to kill her children because she cannot believe the assurances she’s been given that her children will remain safe. None of these stories matter, however, for Medea “is a scapegoat, another mother who is guilty because everyone else has failed” (71). Medea becomes a story “of what happens when a woman is held responsible for the ills of the world” (71).

This myth is a pivotal intertext in Salvage the Bones.36 Throughout Ward’s novel, Esch reads the story of Medea found in Edith Hamilton’s Mythologies and feels a deep kinship with the story’s heroine: “Here is someone that I recognize. When Medea falls in love with Jason, it grabs me by the throat… [Medea] has magic, could bend the natural to the unnatural. But even with all her power, Jason bends her like a young pine in a hard wind; he makes her double in two. I know her” (38). In Medea’s relationship to Jason, she finds herself and her love for Manny, the boy who got her pregnant. Esch explains how she fell in love with Manny before he started dating Shaliyah: “I loved him before that girl. I imagine that this is the way Medea felt about Jason when she fell in love, when she knew him” (56-7). But Manny refuses to acknowledge his sexual relationship with Esch, all the while continuing his public relationship with Shaliyah. 76

Read alongside this myth, it is not surprising that when Manny finds out that Esch is pregnant, “he turned away from me, from what I carry, pulling his burnt gold face from my hands” (147). But Esch does not let Manny walk away without acknowledging that he’s the father. A few days later, she confronts him and when he rejects her claim (“‘I ain’t got nothing here,’” he tells her) Esch is “on him like China” (203). As she hits Manny again and again, we’re told: “This is Medea wielding the knife. This is Medea cutting. I rake my fingernails across his face, leave pink scratches that turn red, fill with blood” (204). Human, animal, and myth come together so that he knows the truth. While originally, Jason makes Medea “double in two” (38), Esch uses Medea’s capacity for magic to make the human and nonhuman become one. She refuses to be broken in two.

In this retelling of the myth of Medea, Ward recalls another story of matricide that became myth: the story of Margaret Garner. Garner was a slave in pre-Civil War America who escaped to Cincinnati in 1865. US Marshals found Garner and were planning to return her and her family back to slaveholders under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. But instead of letting her children suffer a life as slaves, Garner killed her daughter and was in the process of doing the same to her other children when she was stopped. After she was tried in one of the longest fugitive slave trials in history, Garner was sold off to a family in Arkansas and she died two years later from a typhoid epidemic. Garner’s story has inspired various representations, including the 1867 painting by Thomas Satterwhite Nobel entitled The Modern Medea. Garner’s story inspired a much more nuanced representation in Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved, in which the ghost of the murdered child, Beloved, comes back to haunt her mother and her remaining family.

Garner’s ghost also haunts Salvage the Bones, serving to strengthen the affinities between human and nonhuman. Garner killed her child by slitting her throat, and it is the throat that China goes for when she kills her puppy: “China snaps forward, closes her jaw around the puppy’s neck as she does when she carries him, but there is no gentleness in it” (129). An act of care – “as she does when she carries him” – becomes an act of violence. As she watches China, Esch tell us that “If she could speak, this is what I would ask her: Is this what motherhood is?” (130). Esch’s question is an ontological and epistemological one – a question that marks her desire to understand what it will mean for her to become a mother. Her question is also a question about representation, about the ways that, as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson puts it, “representation 77 attaches meaning to bodies” (5). Esch is aware of the ways that “bodies tell stories” (Ward 83). Thus her question also marks a desire to understand how others will tell stories about her body – that being a teen mother is a sickness – and of her knowledge that these stories can enact violence upon Black bodies. As she sets out to answer this question, Esch crafts a new story of motherhood: one that is bloody and violent, but also tender and full of care.

The death of China’s puppy does not mark the end of violence in Salvage the Bones, but its beginning. For China will enact this violence again, this time on the father of her puppies: “She is fire. China flings her head back into the air as if eating oxygen, gaining strength, and burns back down to Kilo and takes his neck in her teeth. She bears down, curling to him, a loving flame, and licks… He roils beneath her. She chews. Fire evaporates water” (175). Evoking the language of mythology, as “fire evaporates water,” violence and care bleed together again: with a “loving flame” and a lick, then China’s “jaw is a mousetrap snapped shut around the mouse of Kilo’s neck” (176). What this scene with China illuminates in the ways in which mothers must do what they can to survive – even if that means killing their own.

Ward continues to build the affinities between Esch and China, between human and animal, when Esch confronts Manny and reveals that she’s pregnant. Earlier in the novel, we’re told that Skeetah utters softly to China as she fights Kilo. He tells her: “Make them know make them know make them know they can’t live without you” (175). These words return to Esch after Manny refuses Esch’s claim that he’s the father: “For some reason I see Skeetah when I blink, Skeetah kneeling next to China, always kneeling, always stroking and loving and knowing her. Skeetah’s face when he stood across from Rico, when he told China, Make them know” (203). As Esch screams at Manny, she imagines China talking to Kilo as she rips into his throat: “Hello, father, she says, tonguing Kilo. I don’t have milk for you… But I do have this” and with that she snaps her jaws around his throat again (175-6). As Esch channels China, she too channels the wrath of Medea – but instead of turning that rage towards her child, as China and Medea did, Esch goes for the father. Her decision to take a different course of action is not a disavowal of these unruly mothers, for she needs their power and their rage in order to make the truth known to Manny, even if he refuses to hear it. Rather, what she refuses in this moment is the cultural story that the individual – i.e. the mother – is the one responsible for the tragedies that will surely come as a result of her pregnancy. 78

Within the world of Ward’s novel, a greater tragedy is about to come: Hurricane Katrina. On August 29, 2005 Hurricane Katrina became one of the most powerful Atlantic storms on record, destroying much of Mississippi and Louisiana. The hurricane claimed over eighteen hundred lives and more than one million people in the Gulf region were left homeless.37 While New Orleans received the brunt of the damage, with over 80% of the city flooded when the levees broke, the coastal regions of Mississippi were greatly damaged after the storm passed through Louisiana. Many evacuated before Katrina touched down, but there were many who could not afford to leave. In the world of Ward’s novel, Esch’s family represents those who had no choice but to stay behind.

Katrina is the hysterical mother par excellence, and it is through her that Esch’s pregnancy is revealed. The water fills Esch’s family home and soon comes to find them in the attic. Recalling the moments when China speaks to Kilo, Katrina speaks to Esch: “The storm screams, I have been waiting for you. Light floods the flooded attic, close as a coffin” (230). Eventually the attic begins to flood too and Esch and the rest of her family must climb through the roof and jump from a tree to the roof of their grandparents’ long empty home. With the puppies tied to her body, and China tied to Skeetah, her brother screams for Esch to come with him first. Their father assumes that Skeetah is concerned with saving the puppies, but then Skeetah points at Esch’s stomach and tells him, “‘She’s pregnant’” (234). Esch can no longer hide her pregnancy, as her wet t-shirt sticks to her body, “sodden with water. Where I used to be all sharp elbows and thighs straight as pine and a stomach like a paved road, my wet clothes show the difference. Daddy saw the curve of a waist, the telltale push of a stomach outward. Daddy saw fruit” (234).

Katrina reveals Esch’s pregnancy and also promises to protect her. As the water submerges Esch and the puppies, Esch worries about the lives of these dogs: “The babies, I think. I kick extra hard, like I am running a race, and my head bobs above the water but the hand of the hurricane pushes it down, down again. Who will deliver me? And the hurricane says ssssssshhhhhhhh. It shushes me through the water, with a voice muffled and deep” (235). In this moment, puppies become babies and a hurricane becomes a midwife promising to deliver, demonstrating how “Pregnancy, then, becomes activated in the text and therefore analogous to the storm” (Marotte 207). Just as water can cause so much destruction, it is water that creates life. Katrina is violent, 79 just like China, just like Medea, but Esch can see that Katrina is more than just death and destruction: she is an mother destroying one world and birthing another.

In offering this reading of Katrina, I do not wish to diminish the destruction she caused, both in real life and in the world of Ward’s novel. Rather, I wish to flesh out how Ward’s depiction of motherhood asks us to consider motherhood and care and intimacy as something that can offer joy and also destruction. In this way, I’m reminded of Lee Edelman and Lauren Berlant’s claim, in Sex or the Unbearable: that intimacy is an encounter with one’s non-sovereignty. Esch describes Katrina in a similar light, as:

The mother that swept into the Gulf and slaughtered. Her chariot was a storm so great and black the Greeks would say it was harnessed to dragons. She was a murderous mother who cut us to the bone but left us alive, left us naked and bewildered as wrinkled newborn babies, as blind puppies, as sun-starved newly hatched baby snakes… she left us to learn to crawl. She left us to salvage. Katrina is the mother we will remember until the next mother with large, merciless hands, committed to blood, comes. (255)

Katrina becomes the new Medea, with her chariot harnessed to dragons. She is also the great equalizer: humans become babies become puppies become baby snakes. Everyone will need to learn how to live, again. And in learning to crawl, they must also learn to grieve. This grief comes in the wake of Katrina, but is also a grief much larger than this historical moment. As Naomi Morgenstern writes, “birth itself is indistinguishable from abandonment, testifying to both the psychological work of destruction and survival and the particularity of impoverished black life, life that is exposed to what we might call ‘a state of nature’” (115).

I began this chapter with the word “wake” and I want to return to it here by looking at Christina Sharpe’s discussion of its multiple meanings in her book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. For a wake is both “the disturbance caused by a body swimming or moved, in water” as well as a mourning ritual, in which “a watch or vigil [is] held beside the body of someone who has died” (3, 10). In Sharpe’s articulation, to exist in the wake is to exist as a Black person in a world that continues to sanction the deaths of Black folks, a world that sees the Black body as abject. For Sharpe, living in the wake is living in a climate of antiblackness (21). Sharpe explains, “I use the wake in all of its meaning as a means of understanding how slavery’s violences emerge within 80 the contemporary condition of spatial, legal, psychic, material, and other dimensions of Black non/being as well as in Black modes of resistance” (14). For Sharpe, living in the wake requires a rethinking of care that rejects the paternalistic care of the state, care rooted in surveillance, and runs laterally across beings. Salvage the Bones offers one such reimagining.

Katrina leaves wakes (in the first sense of the word) and leads to wakes (in the second sense). While Esch’s family survives Katrina, China gets carried off in the wake of the storm. Skeetah will return to the site of their home, not to grieve, but to wait: “‘She’s somewhere out there, and she’s coming back’” (252). Esch and Big Henry try to convince Skeetah to come with them to Big Henry’s for the night: “‘If she comes back, Skeet, ain’t like she going to leave again,’” Esch tells her brother. But there “‘Ain’t no if’” for Skeetah (252). Esch will wait for a while with him, and so will her brothers and Big Henry. But after they leave, Esch knows that Skeetah will remain:

He will listen for the beat of her tail, the padding of her feet in mud. He will look into the future and see her emerge into the circle of his fire, beaten dirty by the hurricane so she doesn’t gleam anymore, so she is the color of his teeth, of the white of his eyes, of the bone bounded by his blood, dull but alive, alive, alive, and when he sees her, his face will break and run water, and it will wear away, like water does, the heart of stone left by her leaving. (258)

China’s body will mirror Skeetah’s: no longer gleaming she’ll become “the color of his teeth, of the white of his eyes, of the bone bounded by his blood” (258). Esch understands that this relationship between human and nonhuman is a kinship that runs as deep as bone and blood. For it is a kinship she feels as well: “She will return, standing tall and straight, the milk burned out of her. She will look down on the circle of light we have made in the Pit, and she will know that I have kept watch, that I have fought. China will bark and call me sister. In the star suffocated sky, there is a great waiting silence. She will know that I am a mother” (258). These are the last words in Salvage the Bones, the understanding that China will recognize Esch in her new figuration, as a mother. And China will be refigured too: “standing tall and straight,” like a human, but still retaining elements of the nonhuman, both barking and calling to Esch. 81

Webs of Care

When China returns, she’ll be welcomed into the web of care that has formed to help Esch raise her baby. My own articulation of webs of care is inspired by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna- Samarasinha’s discussion of “care webs” in her book Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice. For Piepzna-Samarasinha, care webs are the structures of support created for and by disabled and sick bodies that not only enable them to survive, but to thrive. Piepzna-Samarasinha asks: “What does it mean to shift our ideas of access and care (whether it’s disability, childcare, economic access, or many more) from an individual chore, an unfortunate cost of having an unfortunate body, to a collective responsibility that’s maybe even deeply joyful?” (33). It’s vital that these care webs reject the logic of charity that is part and parcel to the neoliberal understanding of state-sanctioned care, and build instead from a deep commitment to solidarity (41). Within these care webs, those giving and receiving care understand that the process of care is reciprocal, it is a form of “mutual aid” which “does not connote moral superiority of the giver over the receiver” (41). In other words, care webs are non-hierarchical and interdependent.

I want to acknowledge the ways in which my own articulation of “webs of care” aligns with the values in the care webs that Piepzna-Samarasinha describes. But I want to take her articulation a bit further to include relationships between humans and nonhumans. For Joan Tronto and Bernice Fischer, care “includes everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair ‘our world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, ourselves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web” (103). In this way, I wish to evoke senses of the nonhuman found in the word web. Just as humans create webs of fabric, spiders weave webs for their survival. It should maybe go without saying, but care webs are not about catching prey. Rather, they’re about catching you as you fall. Webs of care are networks of support and mutual aid that include human and nonhuman, real girls and mythic women. I’m also interested in another meaning of the word web: as a “membrane or fold of skin connecting the fingers or toes, or the digits of an animal; esp. that which connects the toes of an aquatic bird, mammal, amphibian, etc., forming a palmate foot” (13a). On the literal register, webs connect body parts: fingers and toes. On the figurative level, webs connect the bodies of humans and nonhumans, as humans and animals both have webs of their own. 82

Webs also denote “a membrane or thin sheet of tissue in an animal or human body, either natural or (now more commonly) resulting from disease” (11a). That a web can be built from or because of disease further solidifies one of the aims of this dissertation: to reject the pathologizing of sickness. With this definition in mind, I want to posit that disease can enable beautiful things to grow. I also want to recall, how, as I discussed in Chapter 1, we can read disease as dis-ease, as marking that which makes us uncomfortable. Our collective dis-ease with the world we’re living in is what pushes us to build something better. We can mobilize this dis-ease/disease to create a world in which everyone has access to the care that they need and deserve. These webs of care, then, are inherently political and radical in the ways in which they refuse the paltry offerings of state-sanctioned care. Ward is invested in reimagining new forms of care. As Arin Keeble astutely notes, “In none of Ward’s works is there any support or intervention from the American state… Aside from posing a threat to wellbeing, though, the state is absent” (41).

Within Salvage the Bones, a web of care is formed that includes not just all of Esch’s hysterical mothers, but “plenty daddies” too (Ward 255). When Big Henry asks Esch, “‘Who the daddy?’” she responds, “‘It don’t have a daddy’” (254). Big Henry refuses Esch’s answer: “‘You wrong… This baby got a daddy, Esch… This baby got plenty daddies’” (255). Esch will not be left alone to raise her baby, as Medea was. She will find herself surrounded by “plenty daddies,” who will love and care for this creature that she’s bringing into the world. Her story will not become another tragedy. In this way, we can read Salvage the Bones as offering another example of what Jennifer Nash calls “an aesthetics of black maternal abundance” (553) – but one that includes the teen mom of colour. The community will care for Esch and her baby, just as so many other Black babies have been cared for before her. In this way, “Ward radically alters the landscape of southern fiction by having African American characters who not only survive, but who discover within themselves and their communities newfound strength and autonomy” (Coby np).

The conclusion of Ward’s novel is left open. We will not see Esch have her baby. We will not see who all of the daddies will be. But we’re given the sense that Big Henry’s words are not just possibility: they are truth. In her memoir Men We Reaped, Ward describes how “Most of the people here are kin. It is something that the ‘Black’ people will talk about among themselves, the way our families intertwine and feed one another” (10). “Family,” Ward writes, “has always been a mutable concept. Sometimes it encompasses an entire community” (110). Within this 83 community, “We who still live do what we must. Life is a hurricane, and we board up to save what we can…We love each other fiercely, while we live and after we die. We survive; we are savages” (250). Community makes survival possible. But what would need to happen, outside of these webs of care, to make it possible to thrive? Or, perhaps the question is, how can we create webs of care that are even more durable, more sustainable, better supported? The short answer is that we must stop framing teen moms of colour as sick girls in need of a cure. We need to challenge the forms of representation that perpetuate the myth of the teen pregnancy epidemic and make changes that reflect how teen pregnancy is an endemic. We not only need new stories, we need new policies. In the case of teen pregnancy amongst Black girls in the American South, one necessary intervention is comprehensive sex education and access to birth control and abortions.

Sex education remains a contentious topic in the United States writ large, where a “religiously inspired ‘abstinence-only’ moral approach, while under challenge, remains a significant component of sexuality education” (Temple-Smith et al 95).38 Up until 2010, the only funding provided by the US government for sex education was for abstinence-only sex education (96). As of 2010, “Congress eliminated two federal programmes that had funded abstinence-only education and initiated two new evidenced-based sex education programs,” thus demonstrating a slowly mounting recognition that abstinence-only programs do not contribute to declining rates of teen pregnancy and STIs (96). According to Temple-Smith et al., by 2016 thirty-five states require public schools to adopt some form of sex education, and nineteen of those states stress an abstinence-only approach (96). Access to comprehensive sex education is even tougher to come by in the America South. This is especially true in Mississippi and Louisiana; the two states where Ward has lived, and which have undoubtedly shaped Esch’s story.

Despite reports from the 2017 survey conducted by the Louisiana Public Health Institute that state that close to 80% of parents believe that sex education should be a part of the school curriculum, Louisiana State continues to dismiss these findings.39 While Louisiana has the highest rate of adolescent STIs in the nation, and is sixth highest in teen pregnancy, legislators continue to reject House Bill 499, which would require comprehensive sex education in public schools, and House Bill 554, which would enable students to answer questions about their sex lives in a Center for Disease Control and Prevention survey. As it stands, students are asked to 84 respond to questions that ask them about drug and alcohol use, smoking and other health and risk behaviours. But state law forbids asking students about sexual health and activity.

In 2017, I was able to have a conversation with Stefanni Bangel, who was at the time, the program manager of “Creating a Future Together” (CrAFT) at the Institute for Women and Ethnic Studies (IWES). On the IWES website, the purpose of CrAFT is explained as follows:

CrAFT is an initiative that addresses gaps and shifting policy in sexual and reproductive health in New Orleans. CrAFT works to create an educational and policy environment supportive of youth health and development through teacher training, research, implementing a gender-transformative sexual health curriculum, and working on statewide advocacy in coalition with other youth-serving entities.

The program’s goal is to “improve access to, and delivery of, high-quality, comprehensive sexual health education in New Orleans.” But the state has made it very difficult for CrAFT to meet these aims. Bangel noted that because the state has forbidden questions about sexual health and activity on the CDCP survey, Louisiana is unable to receive federal grants for sex education programming. Moreover, programs like CrAFT cannot develop this programming as robustly – and accurately – as they would like. For example, when I asked her if she thought that limited access to contraception was a major contributing factor to high rates of STIs and teen pregnancy, Bangel could only speculate.40 Despite the fact that countless studies show that the decline in teen pregnancy rates is directly correlated to increases in comprehensive sex education and access to contraception, policymakers in Louisiana continue to assert that the best method for preventing teen pregnancy and the contraction of STIs is abstinence-only sex education.41

Those in Mississippi face similar barriers when it comes to offering comprehensive sex education. During that same trip, I spoke with Kenyatta S. Parker, Deputy Bureau Director of the Personal Responsibility Education Program (PREP) at the Mississippi State Department of Health. Like CrAFT, Mississippi PREP “envisions all Mississippi youth to have access to evidence-based, medically accurate, age-appropriate sex education programs and resources, empowering adolescents to make safer reproductive health choices.”42 PREP is a federal grant received by the Mississippi State Department of Health to support teen pregnancy prevention efforts in Mississippi public schools and communities. Schools receive PREP funding if they 85 adopt the Creating Healthy and Responsible Teens (CHART) programing, which offers abstinence-plus and comprehensive sex education.

CHART provides comprehensive sex education programming, but it cannot be offered within schools at this point. There are some major differences between abstinence-plus and comprehensive sex education. While topics such as abortion and same-sex relationships are part of comprehensive sex education, teachers are forbidden from mentioning these topics in abstinence-plus. Parker noted that CHART programming uses gender-neutral names and promotes the use of “partner” over “boyfriend” and “girlfriend” so that those who might be queer can feel included. Some other notable omissions are that you cannot offer condom demonstrations, and classrooms must be divided based on gender.

Parker explained the many challenges facing schools that wish to implement sex education. The first and most major barrier is the need for training. Given that the teachers never received sex education when they were themselves in school, and are offered no additional training during their professional development, teachers have no curriculum to turn to. Then there is the issue of cost: how can schools afford to train their teachers? PREP funding is meant to help fill this gap, while Teen Health Mississippi is another organization that provides the training necessary to support the adoption of sex education policy. But there are still many other challenges that PREP and CHART have to navigate. Schools are at a loss when it comes to restructuring their classrooms to support sex-ed. While gym class is co-gender, if sex-education became part of the class curriculum, you’d need to find enough classroom space to separate boys from girls.43 Then there’s the added problem of what to do with the students whose parents do not opt-in to sex-ed. As it stands, parents must sign a consent form stating their preference for their child’s sex- education: do they want their child to have this education or not? If no consent form is returned, as is all too often the case, the student is placed into the “opt out” category.

These are just some of the hurdles that Parker and those at Teen Health Mississippi are working to overcome. Parker notes that access to sex education is just one part of the solution to lowering teen pregnancy and birth rates. Teens also need access to contraception and abortion. Given that Mississippi only has one abortion clinic in the entire state, accessing abortion is barely an option for most.44 Not only do you need access to a car, as well as the money to pay for an abortion, 86 you’ll need someone who can afford to take the time off of work to accompany you there and (later) help bring you home. You’ll also have to make your way through the crowd of anti- abortion protesters that await you when you arrive.

When it comes to getting access to contraception, there are other barriers to deal with. Given that Mississippi is a largely conservative Christian state, sex before marriage is prohibited, as is the use of contraception. Parker also explained to me how, for those living in smaller towns and rural areas, it is very likely that the person working at the pharmacy is someone you know, someone who knows your family, and thus not a safe person that you can trust to provide you with contraception. But let’s say that’s not the case. How will you find the time to get to the pharmacy when you need to go home right after school to take care of your younger siblings while your parents are at work? Parker and I discussed how incredible it would be if students could access contraception through their high school guidance counsellor – but the idea that this could actually happen is too fantastical to imagine at this point.

And yet, access to contraception and comprehensive sex education are still not enough to stop the high rates of teen pregnancy for girls living in Mississippi (the state ranks 3rd in terms of highest birthrates in the country). There are larger structural issues as well. During our conversation, Parker described the realities of being a teenager living in the rural Delta region of Mississippi: “It’s a very, very sad place to be. There aren’t any recreational things for them to do […] you also have very high poverty rates […] and you also don’t have a lot of places where they can access healthcare there […] There are no parks and no walkways […] There aren’t healthy places to eat. It’s all fast food.” The limited access to resources – and to employment opportunities – leave teen girls with few options. Parker explains how becoming a teen mom means “You can get assistance. You can get housing assistance, food assistance.” The welfare payments they receive after having a child provide them with more economic security and better income than the part-time work available in their small towns. And so the teen pregnancy endemic continues.

Organizations like the Institute for Women and Ethnic Studies, Teen Health Mississippi, and #NoTeenShame are working to challenge the stories and policies that make it difficult, if not impossible, for teens to practice safe sex and avoid pregnancy. Until we see new stories and new 87 policies, which work to depathologize the teen mom as a sick girl in need of a cure, teen moms of colour will continue to struggle. In the meantime, building and supporting webs of care is integral to ensuring that these girls not only survive, but also could perhaps even thrive. The role of the social cannot be overstated. In her conclusion to System Kids: Adolescent Mothers and the Politics of Recognition, Lauren J. Silver argues: “When we focus on social connectivity, we move away from viewing children as parts to be fixed and institutions as the mechanisms to fix the separate pieces” (154). Silver’s study focuses on the ways that social welfare “silos,” including Supervised Independent Living (SIL) programs, work to disconnect youth from the forms of social connectivity that could support their flourishing. In one example, Silver notes how these SIL apartment suites could be connected to college dormitories so that youth aging out of care, including young mothers with their children, could find a new home in community colleges (163).

Like so many of the researchers and activists I cited earlier, Silver puts forth the claim that we need to move away from the medicalized discourse that positions these youth as individual problems in need of a state cure. Silver quotes Richard Calica, director of the Department of Children and Family Services for Illinois, who leverages medical discourse to diagnose the problem of child welfare:

The problem in our field is that we don’t have benchmarks. If you’ve got pancreatic cancer, the odds ratios are that you have a 5% chance of surviving the next twelve months. We don’t even have a classification system in this field. … In terms of a diagnostic classification that would give me odds ratios of your probability of improvement success and standard treatment protocols—our friend is way behind medicine. (157)

Silver picks up on the problematic language of medical discourse used by Calica, noting how “He apparently perceives these child and youth as possessing a disease that needs to be assessed and then cured” (157). The problem with this language, argues Silver, is that in “viewing children in care as illnesses to be treated,” we effectively “remove our focus from ‘the problem’ of structural conditions, among them urban poverty, racism, gender violence, and institutional 88 polarization” (158). And thus Silver goes on to proclaim: “The disease is not in marginalized youth but rather in society” (158).

What I hope to have shown throughout this chapter is that teen pregnancy is not an epidemic. Rather, it’s an endemic. By continuing to perpetuate the myth of epidemic, the state uses the language of illness to pathologize teen moms of colour in the American South. The solution is thus to cure these mothers. And yet, such a cure will never come when the very states where teen pregnancy and birth rates that are the highest also continue to refuse to: increase state care, address the systemic issues that contribute to these high rates of not just pregnancy but also poverty, and implement comprehensive sex education along with access to birth control and abortions. Despite the lack of care from the state, these teen moms and their communities build webs of care that serve to disrupt the state’s attempts to pathologize the Black community and leave its members in a state of debilitation.

We will see a similar desire to disrupt the pathologization of female sexuality in the following chapter. While the sick girl of Chapter 3 is white, lower-middle class, and thus holds different forms of privilege than the Black teen moms I’ve focused on in this chapter, we can see a similar desire to label the sexually active girl as sick at play. I’ll shift our focus from stories created by the state, to stories written by these sick girls via the genre of autofiction. If the question of Chapter 2 was “How does the sick girl refuse the pathologizing logics of the state?”, then Chapter 3 asks a different, but similar question: “How does the sick girl push back against those who tell her that the sex she finds pleasure in is sick?” I’ll now move from looking at the hysterical intimacies that can foster community towards the moments of hysterical intimacy found in fleeting encounters between strangers and those who we may never see again.

89

Chapter Notes

1 TIME Magazine reported that on March 24th, the state of Texas banned all doctors from providing abortions during the pandemic (Abrams). Planned Parenthood quickly took action, suing Texas “on behalf of a group of abortion providers” with the plan to take the case to the U. S. Supreme Court said earlier in the day on April 7 that if the Fifth Circuit did not rule, they planned to take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court (Abrams). Texas was the first of many other Republican-led states to place a temporary ban on abortion services. According to the Guttmacher Institute, Alabama, Arkansas, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Tennessee have followed suit. See Abrams; Palacio; Planned Parenthood; Sobel et al.

2 For a full timeline and summary of events see Planned Parenthood.

3 See Sobel et al. For more information about the increase in driving distances for out of state care, see the Guttmacher Institute’s Report by Bearak et al.

4 It is vital that we untether biology and gender, recognizing the ways in which those who are assigned female at birth may go on to have children but not identify as “women.”

5 See Robinson.

6 See Katersky and Torres.

7 See Smith et al.

8 See Zanolli.

9 For Collins’ articulation of “other-mothering” and “community-mothering” see Black Feminist Thought (191-5). See also Mia Birdsong’s How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community (107-138).

10 See Dorothy Roberts’s Killing the Black Body (1998); Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought (2000), Shatema Threadcraft, Intimate Justice: The Black Female Body and the Body Politic (2016); Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman, “On Ferguson, the Fragility of Black Boys, and Feminist Futures” (2018); and Jennifer Nash, “Black Maternal Aesthetics” (2019). 90

11 For more on the ways that teen pregnancy is framed as pathological, see Stapleton.

12 Harriet A. Washington’s Medical Apartheid details this history, which includes: “The slave appropriated by physicians for experimental surgeries, the impoverished clinic patient operated upon to devise or demonstrate a surgical technique, the sharecropper whose body is spirited from a morgue for dissection, the young girl whose fertility is stolen via an untested contraceptive technique or a ‘Mississippi appendectomy’ (involuntary sterilization), the soldiers, prisoners, and children who find themselves without options when government physicians foist novel medications and techniques upon those with little legal protection” (9).

13 See Martin S. Pernick’s The Black Stork: Eugenics and the Death of “Defective” Babies in American Medicine and Motion Pictures Since 1951 (106) and John Hoberman’s Black and Blue: The Origins and Consequences of Medical Racism (93).

14 On Tuesday, April 17, 2018, New York removed the statue of J. Marion Sims as part of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s review of city markers that could be deemed “symbols of hate.” See Lockhart.

15 America wasn’t the only nation to justify forced sterilization on the grounds of eugenics. In her discussion of how “reproduction has been framed against disability in modern Korean culture,” Eunjung Kim points out how curative interventions in reproduction are linked to the historical emergence of eugenic ideology within the project of colonization (44). Kim traces this history from the “hereditary drama” of 1930s into the 1970s when heredity became a moralized justification for rejecting disability. Kim’s history ends in the contemporary moment with the rise in preimplantation genetic screening and marriage disqualification based on reproductive prospects. See Curative Violence: Rehabilitating Disability, Gender, and Sexuality in Modern Korea (42-80).

16 Washington explains: “In a refinement of earlier scientific racism, eugenics was appropriated to label black women as sexually indiscriminate and as bad mothers who were constrained by biology to give birth to defective children. The demonization of black parents, particularly mothers, as medically and behaviourally unfit has a long history, but twentieth-century eugenicists provided the necessary biological underpinnings to scientifically validate these 91

beliefs. The sexual irrepressibility and the bad mothering were biologically located in the hereditary apparatus, they contended” (191).

17 See Elaine Bell Kaplan’s Not Our Kind of Girl: Unraveling the Myths of Black Teenage Motherhood for a history of black women and teen moms using the welfare system to support themselves and their families (129-152). Dorothy Roberts offers a more critical reading of this history in Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (202-245). See also Harriet A. Washington’s Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. Washington explains how the belief that “blacks prefer welfare to employment” has justified state-sanctioned efforts to sterilize black women for decades (203).

18 For more on this history and the policy development, see Vinovskis.

19 In Embodying the Persuasive Power of the Teen Mother, Vinson describes how “Out of the 21 million teenagers aged fifteen to nineteen living in the United States, the AGI estimated that 11 million were sexually active and, thus, potentially susceptible to what they called an ‘epidemic’ of pregnancy” (12).

20 Erdman and Black are drawing on the work of Wanda Pillows and her book Unfit Subjects: Educational Policy in the Teen Mother.

21 See Cillizza.

22 See CDC, “Lesson 1: Introduction to Epidemiology.”

23 Melissa Henson is one such critic: “instead of really helping viewers understand the day-to- day responsibilities of attending to a new infant – scrubbing poop stains or spit-up out of clothing – or dwelling on the ‘mundane,’ MTV chooses to focus on the girls’ volatile relationships with the babies’ fathers or their new body piercings and tattoos. That makes for better TV. Just look at how MTV promotes the show. In its e-mail newsletters, MTV proclaims ‘Amber Portwood Gets Baby Leah Belly Tattoo’ or ‘Jenelle Runs Up Her Mother's Credit Card Bill.’ Not, ‘Amber Portwood has only had six hours of sleep in two days because her baby won't stop crying!’” But 92

other viewers of the show disagree. Feifei Sun claims that, “The series does not sugarcoat the challenges its subjects face: the slights and scorn of peers, friction with disappointed (grand)parents, colic, drudgery, arguments, sleep deprivation and – with dismayingly few exceptions – the burden of a feckless, absent or outright abusive boyfriend” and an article by Annie Lowrey in TIME quotes various teen viewers explaining how the show offers them insight into the challenges of raising a child as a teen and provides a springboard for broaching this taboo subject with parents and teachers.

24 See Eliana Docketerman’s “Does 16 and Pregnant Prevent or Promote Teen Pregnancy?”

25 These numbers show a slight decrease from 2012. In their 2015 study, Melissa Kearney and Philip Levine noted that in 2012, twenty-nine out of every one thousand girls between the ages of fifteen and nineteen had given birth, whereas the average in other developed countries is between five to ten for every one thousand.

26 See “U.S Teen Birth Rates Drops a Dramatic 9% in 2010,” The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, November 17 2011. See also Dinh; and Temple Smith et al.

27 See Joanna Gregson’s The Culture of Teenage Mothers for examples of stigmatization at social services agencies, students and teachers at school, and the general public. See also: Kaplan; Stapleton; Vinson. See Merrick for an analysis of the racial stigmatization experienced by black adolescent mothers.

28 These narratives have a long history going back over forty years, when Arthur Campbell wrote: “The girl who has an illegitimate child at the age of 16 suddenly has 90% of her life’s script written for her. She will probably drop out of school; even if someone else in her family helps to take care of the baby, she will probably not be able to find a steady job that pays enough to provide for herself and her child; she may feel impelled to marry someone she might not otherwise have chosen. Her life choices are few and most of them are bad” (268). And yet, Temple-Smith et al explain how “these dire predictions have not been strongly supported by subsequent research” (231).

29 For an in-depth analysis of these images, and the responses to them, see Daldin. 93

30 Levine and Kearney are not alone in this assessment. See also: Wilson and Huntington for a survey of studies across the UK, US, and New Zealand.

31 A 2014 survey found that over seventy percent of those polled believe that sex between teenagers is morally deplorable and “largely unacceptable.” See Riffkin.

32 See Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, “About Teen Pregnancy”; Power to Decide: the Campaign to Prevent Unplanned Pregnancy; and Wiltz.

33 Additionally, they found that “teen moms on these reality programs received more social support than the average teen mother in the United States” (1551) and “teen mothers on MTV did not mention welfare receipt or insurance coverage in 95% of the episodes,” which means that mothers receiving government support were seriously under-represented (1552). They also posit that the lack of conversation around social assistance might be due, in large part, to the financial compensation that these teen mothers earn from being on the show ($75,000 a season) not to mention the subsequent fame that many of the teen moms have gone on to experience.

34 I’m not the first to pinpoint the ways that racialized subjects and pit bulls are viewed along similar lines. In an essay for Esquire, pit bull owner Tom Junod describes how an insurance underwriter interrogated his wife when she tried to change their homeowner’s policy: “Eventually, he asked if we had a dog. ‘Yes,’ my wife said. What kind? ‘A mixed-breed terrier,’ my wife said. He asked how much he weighed. ‘Fifty-five pounds,’ she said. He then proceeded to ask about his coat, his coloring, the width of his head, and the shape of his tail—he then proceeded, in other words, to profile him.” According to recent statistics, pit bulls are banned in 373 cities across the United States (https://animalfarmfoundation.org/community-advocates/bsl- map/).

35 For another examples of queering the human/animal divide, see Maggie Nelson’s discussion of A. L. Steiner’s 2012 installation, Puppies and Babies, in her book The Argonauts (70-73). Nelson reads Steiner’s installation as an example of queer family making, “be they composed of peers or mentors or lovers or ex-lovers or children or non-human animals,” in which, “no one set 94

of practices or relations has the monopoly on the so-called radical, or the so-called normative” (72-3).

36 Ward explains her decision to engage with the myth of Medea in an interview with The Paris Review: “It infuriates me that the work of white American writers can be universal and lay claim to classic texts, while black and female authors are ghettoized as ‘other.’ I wanted to align Esch with that classic text, with the universal figure of Medea, the antihero, to claim that tradition as part of my Western literary heritage. The stories I write are particular to my community and my people, which means the details are particular to our circumstances, but the larger story of the survivor, the savage, is essentially a universal, human one.”

37 See CNN “Hurricane Katrina Statistics Fast Facts.”

38 See also: Peppard and Schaalma et al.

39 For the full survey see the Institute of Women and Ethnic Studies.

40 Studies by Miller and Moore (1990) and Phipps, Rosengard, Weitzen, Meers, and Millinkoff (2008) report that adolescents are not likely to use contraception when having sex. But, as Gregson (2009) notes, in her study of participants at the Teen Center, the stories told by teen parents suggested that they didn’t use contraception “because they did not know how to access it or did not think they needed it… They were ignorant about the reproductive system, unaware of their contraceptive options, and naïve when it came to judging their boyfriends’ claims that they did not need contraception” (41). Gregson’s findings support the need for more robust sex education.

41 See Santelli, J. et al.

42 See Mississippi State Department of Health.

43 Teen Health Mississippi outlines the pros and cons of integrating sex education into the course curriculum for science class and phys-ed in their The CHART Implementation Guide. 95

44 Attempts to open a second clinic in 2006 were unsuccessful due to the presence of anti- abortion protesters. The only remaining abortion clinic in Mississippi, Jackson Women’s Health Organization, is continually under threat. Amanda Arnold reported that in May 2017, the Center for Pregnancy Choices, an anti-abortion center with a mission ‘to offer a viable alternative for women who are in crisis pregnancy situations’ opened on April 22, just 100 yards away.” Arnold goes on to reference a 2016 study from Feminist Majority Foundation, which “found that clinics located near a CPC had a 21.7 percent chance of experiencing ‘high levels of violence, threats, and harassment,’ whereas clinics not near a CPC had a 6.8 percent chance.” In their article for The New York Times, Audrey Carlsen, Ash Ngu, and Sara Simon provide a comparative analysis of the process of getting an abortion in California State, which has no major abortion restrictions, and Mississippi, which is amongst the highest restrictive states in the U.S. CNN reported that in March 2018, Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant banned nearly all abortions after 15 weeks with the Gestational Age Act, thus adding to the barriers of receiving in-state abortions. Under the new law, there are “exceptions only for medical emergencies or cases in which there’s a ‘severe fetal abnormality.’ There are no exceptions for incidents of rape or incest.” The Jackson Women’s Health Organization challenged the law and in November 2018 US District Judge Carlton Reeves of Mississippi’s Southern District struck down Bryant’s law for “unequivocally” infringing upon a woman’s 14th Amendment due process rights. 96

Chapter 3: Ambivalent Desires: Ugly Sex & the Intimacy to Come

Ambivalent Confessions

I feel called to start this chapter with a confession: I have had ugly sex. No, I do not mean bad sex (although I’ve had plenty of that too). I’m talking about the sex that you desire but also feel a bit repulsed by. Sex that gets you off, but leaves you feeling unsettled afterwards. Sex that is messy and ambivalent, and thus different from the so-called fully empowered, unequivocally “yes!” sex that women (especially feminists) are supposed to have.

In making this confession, I know that I’m not alone. In fact, I’m pretty sure that every person who was assigned female at birth has had this sex (and plenty of it too). Whether in their teenage years, with boys whose sloppy kisses disgusted them and turned them on at the same time, or later as a young adult who knows that sex should be better than what’s being offered to them by countless mediocre men. Sometimes these encounters are one offs and we never see the other person again. Other times they are, for lack of a better phrase, repeat offenses that we subject ourselves to again and again; some grown up version of the fort-da game that Freud witnessed in his grandson, who had made up his own game to re-enact the disappearance and reappearance of his mother. “The going away of the mother cannot possibly have been pleasant for the child, nor even a matter of indifference,” Freud remarks in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (53). “How then does his repetition of this painful experience in his play fit with the pleasure principle?” (53). I could ask myself the same question after each one of my ugly sexual encounters.

This is not the first time I have made this confession. And so it wasn’t surprising that so many my friends and colleagues messaged me when Kristen Roupenian’s short story “Cat Person” went viral.1 Published in The New Yorker in December 2017, “Cat Person” follows a twenty year-old woman named Margot (the similarity of our names was not lost on me) who goes on a few dates with the thirty-four year-old Robert, a man who frequents the cinema where she works. After weeks of exchanging text messages, Margot meets Robert for one of the most awkward dates in history, in which he takes her to “a very depressing drama about the Holocaust, so inappropriate for a first date” (82). After the movie, Robert asks her if she’d like to have a drink and Margot agrees only to be turned away at the door because she’s one year shy of legal

97 drinking age. They find a different bar and after three drinks Margot starts to think about what it would be like to have sex with Robert: “Probably it would be like that bad kiss, clumsy and excessive, but imagining how excited he would be, how hungry and eager to impress her, she felt a twinge of desire pluck at her belly, as distinct and painful as the snap of an elastic band against her skin” (85). That Margot imagines this encounter as both “clumsy and excessive … distinct and painful” and also capable of causing a “twinge of desire” reveals a lot about the ambivalence of desire. But this ambivalence does not deter her from having sex with Robert. In fact, it’s just the opposite.

The two go to Robert’s place where Margot is forced to confront the ugly sexual encounter awaiting her:

When Robert was naked, rolling a condom onto a dick that was only half visible beneath the hairy shelf of his belly, she felt a wave of revulsion that she thought might actually break through her sense of pinned stasis, but then he shoved his finger in her again, not at all gently this time, and she imagined herself from above, naked and spread-eagled with this fat old man’s finger inside her, and her revulsion turned to self- disgust and a humiliation that was a kind of perverse cousin to arousal. (91)

The only way for Margot to get through her “pinned stasis” beneath the man who throws her around, “as if they were in a porno” and growls, “‘I always wanted to fuck a girl with nice tits’ in her ear” is to dissociate.2 Imagining herself “from above” allows her to transform her revulsion – which comes less from Robert’s body and more from how he treats hers – into feelings that are more bearable. By shifting the focus away from Robert and onto herself, Margot transforms revulsion into self-disgust and humiliation, and these feelings enable her to get a bit closer to feeling aroused.

After the act is over, and Robert drops her off at home, Margot stops responding to his texts. She wants to figure out how to break things off without hurting his feelings, and after a few days of torturing herself, her roommate steals her phone and texts Robert “Hi im not interested in you stop textng me” (96). Robert responds back with more kindness than you’d expect from a man who got a girl, fifteen years his junior, drunk at a bar and then took her home and proceeded to not think at all about her desire as he had sex with her. The story ends with Margot spotting 98

Robert in a bar a month later. Not wishing to be seen by him, she leaves with her friends. Later that night she receives a series of text messages from Robert, which start out benignly (“I just wanted to say you looked really pretty” and “I really miss you”) before getting increasingly aggressive, ending with “Whore” (98).

I immediately fell in love with the story for all of the ways in which it dares to represent ugly sex. But the responses to “Cat Person” were wide-ranging. Women quickly flocked to Twitter to proclaim #metoo. @alanalevinson tweeted: “So much of hetero dating is based on a very sick, sad contract: you (woman) better like the holocaust documentary & when he sucks at fingering you that’s somehow your fault.” The response from male readers was decidedly different and vacillated between judgment and confusion: “Some guys are bad at kissing, and bad at relationships. Having sex very soon after meeting someone is usually not a good life decision imo,” tweets @RossGellar4823 while @logankugler asks, “What are all of you relating to in this? I’m confused. Can a sister enlighten a brother?”4 One man was so confused by Margot’s actions that he penned an open letter to the character entitled “Dear Cat Person Girl.” In his open letter to Margot, Kyle Smith tells the fictional character, “I don’t think you have thought through how you got into a terrible situation” and then the slut shaming begins with Smith questioning Margot’s previous sexual history (she’s had sex with seven men and seven is too many for her age) and explaining that her choice to sleep with Robert after “1.5 dates is a bad idea.” Had they spent more time developing an emotional connection, Margot “could have made it clear that [she] didn’t like being treated like a porn star.” The claim that emotional connection is necessary for good bedside manner is problematic for many reasons. Firstly, this logic works to blame the girl for not fostering an emotional connection before choosing to have sex and removes any onus from the man (wasn’t he at all interested in creating that connection?). Secondly, this claim promotes the false belief that emotional connection is the key to good sex while simultaneously ignoring the fact that bad and non-consensual sex occurs both with and without emotional ties.5

Unsurprisingly, then, the responsibility for good sex is placed on Margot. And the same holds true for her choice to have three drinks, which, as Smith notes, “is another bad idea.”6 What Smith fails to acknowledge, alongside so many others wishing to defend Robert’s actions, is that Margot is confronted with a lose-lose situation: does she say no to having sex with Robert and risk being viewed as a tease or does she choose the ugly sex to come: 99

But the thought of what it would take to stop what she had set in motion was overwhelming; it would require an amount of tact and gentleness that she felt was impossible to summon. It wasn’t that she was scared he would try to force her to do something against her will but that insisting that they stop now, after everything she’d done to push this forward, would make her seem spoiled and capricious, as if she’d ordered something at a restaurant and then, once the food arrived, had changed her mind and sent it back. (88)

Margot chooses to go through with the act and like so many women, prioritizes his pleasure over her own. Margot’s decision marks the ways in which, as Juana María Rodríguez poignantly puts it, “coercion is rarely absolute” (2011, 340). Rodríguez goes on to point out that

most of the sexual contracts we enter have everything to do with various forms of coercion mandated by the social bonds we inhabit. Whether with a partner, date, trick, or wife, sex can become a social obligation that is offered in exchange for dinner, domestic harmony, rent, safety or our own sexual pleasure […] Whether in overt commercial exchanges, casual anonymous encounters, or intimate relations structured around love and care, sex functions as a kind of trade. (340)

Margot finds herself faced with a social obligation: in choosing to go through with sex with Robert, she avoids the discomfort that comes with rejecting his advances and the possibility that he’ll decide that she’s “spoiled and capricious.” More importantly, Rodríguez’s insight points to the ways in which this trade – woman’s sexual discomfort for a man’s pleasure; a man’s pleasure for a woman’s comfort after the fact – can and does take place in casual encounters and long- term intimate relationships.

I begin this chapter with the story of “Cat Person” for a few reasons. First, because it offers an exemplary description of a sexual encounter that so many women have experienced, but few have dared to write about: an encounter that I call ugly sex. Second, because of the response the story provoked, which Olivia Sudjic summarizes as illuminating “just how deep misogyny runs that a story told in the omniscient third person but from the perspective of a woman should be regarded not as art but internet confession” (97). What the responses demonstrate is just how quickly women are pathologized for accepting this paltry offering.7 But the focus on why women 100 choose to sleep with awful men is a critical distraction, yielding only two possible outcomes – either, from the popular viewpoint, women are individually at fault for their bad choices or, from a more feminist perspective, patriarchal structures of inequality make it incredibly difficult, if not impossible, for women to choose otherwise. Instead, we need to shift our focus to a different set of questions: Why are we so quick to pathologize the woman who has ugly sex and what does such a reading foreclose? How do we parse different experiences of sexual negativity and sexual ambivalence? What are the textual practices and forms that might best reveal the intricacies of the scene of ugly sex?

In order to answer these questions, I begin by laying out the theoretical groundwork for this chapter. I then focus on the role that ambivalence plays in sexual encounter by looking at two other works: Marie Calloway’s what purpose did i serve in your life (2013) and Catherine Fatima’s Sludge Utopia (2018). I have selected these texts not only for the depiction of ugly sex in each, but also because each is a work of autofiction.8 It is this genre of writing in particular that leaves so many readers perturbed. In general, autofiction refuses clearly demarcated generic boundaries. Looking at women’s autofictional writing about ugly sex, in particular, enables us to see how the blurring of fiction and nonfiction can formally reflect the attractions and repulsions, forms of empowerment and humiliation that characterize sexual ambivalence. But, in order to resist the pathologization of ambivalent feelings and blurry boundaries, Calloway and Fatima fashion an aesthetic of flat affect to describe their sexual encounters. As such, they manage to represent the feeling of sexual ambivalence while stripping it of dramatic intensity.

In what follows, I propose that we read Fatima and Calloway’s flat affective descriptions of ugly sexual encounters as an aesthetic practice of what I call “anti-hystericalism” – a term I coin to characterize how these authors generate fiction that makes multiple interventions in existing gendered narratives of female sexual pathology. For one thing, they reject “the logic of the cure” that was historically forced upon young women by former pseudo-sciences imagining women’s bodies as sites and signs of hysteria. For another, they work to de-dramatize over-wrought sexual narratives associated with the genres of popular romance and sentimentality. What Calloway and Fatima suggest instead is that acknowledging the existence of a complicated desire for ugly sex can enable us to turn away from the logic of pathologization attached to non-normative or ambivalent sexual desires. What we might find instead is that our ugliest encounters may tell us 101 the most about our sexual feelings. We might even say that Catherine and Marie’s depiction of their desires and the sex they have, despite the heterosexual nature of the encounter, reflect a particularly queer desire to embrace ambivalence via fleeting sexual intimacy with (near) strangers.9

In the final section of this chapter, I look at the ways that Catherine and Marie’s narratives ask us to reimagine the forms that sexual intimacy can take. Intimacy does not always require emotional connection; moreover, it can be found outside of the long-term partnership all too often valorized by heteronormativity.10 If we’ve come to understand intimacy as necessitating an emotional connection with a person, fostered by the knowledge of their inner most nature, a text such as Sludge Utopia reveals how it is all too common to hide our inner most desires from those we love the most, those who might appear to be our most intimate relations. If it is the case that our desires are inherently ambivalent and ugly then perhaps the safest place to reveal that – and avoid being pathologized – is in the bedroom with those we may never see again.

Feminist Sex & the Problem of Ambivalence

Ugly sex is a term I am using to refer to sexual encounters that might be degrading or humiliating, that might leave you feeling not so great afterwards, but that are still pleasurable in the moment and might cause you to want more. Ugly sex captures the oscillation between empowerment and devastation, attraction and repulsion, agency and subordination. Ugly sex is the sex that we are not supposed to talk about, especially as women, because the only kind of feminist sex is the sex that empowers you – a point I’ll return to shortly. But enjoyable sex is not always empowering even if it makes you feel good. Thus, ugly sex presents a problem for feminist articulations of power and self-determination. In the world of feminist criticism and the sex positivity movement, sex is framed in binary terms: sex either makes you feel pleasure (at worst) or empowered (at best); or sex makes you feel violated, devastated, and traumatized.

This polarizing view of feminist sex emerged during the second wave of feminism with the now infamous pornography wars of the 1970s and 80s. Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon were at the center of this discussion. For Dworkin, who penned Pornography: Men Possessing Women, pornography was inextricably tied to the domination of women and therefore was anti- feminist. Susan Brownmiller made similar claims, arguing that “there can be no ‘equality’ in 102 porn, no female equivalent … pornography, like rape, is a male invention, designed to dehumanize women, to reduce the female to an object of sexual access, not to free sensuality from moralistic or parental inhibition” (32). Laura Kipnis summarizes the sentiments of anti- pornography feminists as follows: “What pornography both portrays and endeavors to perpetuate is the deployment of male power over female bodies; while violating women through representation is just one instance of the male desire to violate women generally, it is the sole purpose of porn” (124-5). And yet, as Kipnis points out, the anti-porn feminists were just as guilty of deploying power over female bodies: “anti-pornography feminism,” she writes, “shares a highly questionable alliance with the Right and the state to the extent that both see sexual representation as a potential site of regulation and law” (124).

On the other side of this debate were sex-positive feminists, including Gayle Rubin, whose formative essay “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality” has become a touchstone for those offering more reparative readings not just of pornography but of a fuller spectrum of consensual sexual practice more generally. For Rubin, “a radical theory of sex must identify, describe, explain, and denounce erotic injustice and sexual oppression” (145). In order to do so, we must challenge the pervasive assumptions that structure how sex is understood. The first assumption she discusses is sexual essentialism, which claims that sexuality is a “biological phenomenon or as an aspect of individual psychology” and is thus not shaped by our social worlds (147). Rubin goes on to name five other ideological formations that must be addressed: “sex negativity, the fallacy of misplaced scale, the hierarchical valuation of sex acts, the domino theory of sexual peril, and the lack of a concept of benign sexual variation” (148). Of these, Rubin names sex negativity as the most important site for interrogation. Under the logic of sex negativity, any sex that isn’t purely procreative is deemed suspicious if not dangerous, “presumed guilty until proven innocent” (148). This belief creates a socio-sexual hierarchy, in which heterosexual reproductive sex holds the highest value with the lowest value attributed to “transsexuals, transvestites, fetishists, sadomasochists, sex workers such as prostitutes and porn models, and the lowliest of all, those whose eroticism transgresses generational boundaries” (149). Desires outside of the “charmed circle” of reproductive heterosexuality are read as increasingly pathological and in need of state control – either in the hands of medical professionals or the courts, and sometimes both.11 And yet, Rubin will go on to note how, despite the fact that “the legal apparatus of sex is staggering most everyday social control is extralegal.” 103

By this she means that everyday, informal practices of social policing are consistently deployed against minoritized sexual populations (163). And it is here that we find ourselves confronting the injunctions on pornography from the anti-porn feminists of the second wave.

That anti-pornography feminists were particularly concerned with representations of sadomasochism should not be surprising. Rubin summarizes this attack on S/M pornography as follows: “A great deal of antiporn propaganda implies that sadomasochism is the underlying and essential ‘truth’ toward which all pornography tends. Porn is thought to lead to S/M porn which in turn is alleged to lead to rape” (169). For Rubin, “this discourse on sexuality is less a sexology than a demonology” (172). Rubin highlights how the logic at play in the vehement opposition to S/M pornography implies that the pornography will cause sexist relations, when in fact it’s the other way around: the sexist world we live in creates forms of pornography that reflect it. Unfortunately, the moral panic surrounding pornography – and S/M porn in particular – hasn’t changed much since Rubin’s essay was published in 1984.12 Nonetheless, the reparative scholarship on BDSM pornography by queer women of color has worked to challenge this panic in ways that expand on Rubin’s initial arguments about sexual negativity and its pleasures.13

Ariane Cruz notes that in the history of Black feminists discussions of BSDM, scholars tend to privilege a reading of BDSM and BDSM pornography as injurious, thus eradicating the life of pleasure present in these practices (21). This attention to injury and harm is inextricably tied to the history of sexual trauma experienced by Black women and other women of color.14 Cruz intervenes in these discussions by offering a nuanced reading of the dynamics of pleasure and power imbued with the memory of chattel slavery. In The Color of Kink: Black Women, BDSM, and Pornography, Cruz argues, “Performances of black female sexual aggression, domination, humiliation, and submission in pornography and BDSM [are] crucial modes of black women’s pleasure, power, and agency” (3). Cruz describes race play as “a practice that explicitly uses race to script power exchange and the dynamics of domination and submission” (33). Within the world of race play, racism becomes “a tool of practice, often involving the exchange of racist language, role play, and the construction of racial degradation” (33). Cruz emphasizes that we must recognize that the pain of chattel slavery need not negate the pleasure that can come with this queer BDSM reimagining. Engaging with the work of Mireille Miller-Young, Cruz continues: 104

Black women’s history of racial-sexual violence and ‘exploitation’ nuances their labor in pornography, a visual domain in which they are ‘ambivalently mythologized as sources of both fascination and disgust in a system organized around the marking and marketing of their absolute difference.’ Conveying this ambivalence ‘illicit eroticism’ encompasses how black women capitalize on their ‘mythic racialized hypersexuality in the sexual economy.’” (20)

What Cruz illuminates here is the ways that Black women are produced by white culture as ambivalent objects, marked by both “fascination and disgust,” as well as how they refunction that status. Cruz thus argues that the practices of race play and rape play in BDSM can function as examples of “BDSM’s therapeutic possibility,” for it is through reenacting past sexual traumas “on their own terms,” that Black women engaging in these practices “become agents of their own sexual pleasure and pain” (63).15 Note here that pain is not transformed into pleasure; rather, in Cruz’s theorization both pleasure and pain exist side by side. Pushing back against the politics of respectability that forecloses the potentiality of pleasure in these sexual acts, Cruz thus reveals how race play highlights the ways in which racial hierarchies are “performative and unnatural,” and in so doing, they open up “innovative new modes of accessing pleasure” (65, 72).

Like Cruz, Jennifer Declue is invested in the therapeutic potential of BDSM for Black women, and Black lesbians in particular: “Rather than working to free black lesbian sexuality from the legacy of sexual violence and trauma, the films discussed here” create “scenarios in which black lesbian characters explore sexual domination and submission, pleasure and pain, as ecstatic modes that can release the trauma of sexual violence and racial oppression” (218). Analyzing the ways in which historical trauma has foreclosed “black erotic possibilities” (225), Declue argues that domination and submission, which all too often reproduce phallic gender power and white dominance, can transform into a fantasy space in which “discomfort, fear, pleasure, and catharsis” can exist simultaneously (224).

Cruz and Declue are not the only ones to offer reparative readings of the fantasies of sexual objectification. In Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings, Juana María Rodríguez asks: “How do we begin to make sense of willful sexual fantasies of violence and abjection that sometimes creep into our psychic and erotic imaginations, and the shame, delight, 105 or confusion that these thoughts generate?” (26). Rodríguez answers this question by drawing on a varied archive of pornographic materials: from burlesque performances to daddy play, Rodríguez believes that it is possible to “activate abjection as a resource for a reclamation of erotic-self-determination and world-making” (21). “To deny our fantasies because they are too twisted, too painful, or too perverse, to erase their presence or censor their articulation in public life,” she argues, “constitutes a particular kind of insidious violence that threatens to undermine our ability to explore the contours of our psychic lives and imaginary possibilities of the social worlds in which we exist” (185). Within the world of fantasy, “we can rewrite scripts of sexualized objectification, subjection, and racialized violence” and “we can make familial shame sexy and state discipline erotic” (180). What I appreciate about Rodríguez’s work is her attention to the ways in which BDSM fantasies – and their enactments – are not the only site where “the coercive deployment of power” might play out. Rodríguez urges us to recognize “how fantasies of domestic bliss are likewise predicated on multiple forms of corrosive power” (179). For Rodríguez, power’s operations are insidious and can be found not just in the exceptional scenes of race play or daddy play in BDSM pornography, but in quotidian social exchanges as well. It is to these more quotidian scenes that I’d like to turn now.

Ugly Sex & Anti-Hystericalism

Pornography has provided a rich site to think about questions of sexuality, subjectivity, and agency. The messiness and ambivalence of desire have been firmly located within the pornographic landscape, but these dynamics of desire and repulsion, coercion and consent, empowerment and humiliation, as Rodriguez points out, take place in the privacy of one’s bedroom as well. How might the stakes of our “politically incorrect erotic desires” – to borrow the words of Rodríguez (2011, 340) – change when there’s no camera or audience to perform for? What happens when the sex is no longer exceptional – as is the case with the more dramatic sites of BDSM play discussed above – but all too mundane?

I’m not only interested in shifting scenes here. I’d also like to consider a shift in form. The feminist thinkers I’ve just discussed are interested in visual representations: photographs, videos, live performances. What happens when these scenes play out on the page, rather than the screen? Moreover, what can we discover about the significance in shifts in form, when we move from 106 discussions of the explicitly pornographic to works of writing in which the protagonists interrogate their own fraught relationships to pornography.16

If we can say that women generally are faced with two nearly impossible and undesirable injunctions not only to have the right kind of sex, but to only speak about or admit to the right kind of sex, women writers are faced with another: they must avoid discussing the perverse aspects of desire or do so in a purely fictional manner. These injunctions are highly gendered. Jessica Valenti, the author of Sex Object, tells Casey Schwartz how, “Whenever women write about sex, whenever they write about their relationship history, there’s a sort of rush to judgment that it must be navel gazing, it must be frivolous, it’s unimportant. Whereas of course when men write things about their sex lives or past relationships, it’s brave and universal and all the great things.” For Elizabeth Donnelly, this is the double-edged sword that women writers face: “women, particularly women in their 20s, do have a quick road to publishing success when they are writing about their young and modern lives, particularly when there is the whiff of sex or scandal,” but when they “dare to dive into the messy and the mundane, they’re taken to task for creative solipsism.”17

To talk about sex, then, presents a whole host of problems for writers who’re not cisgender men. These problems reflect how both the patriarchy and feminism work to control women’s pleasure, leaving no room for the sexual experiences that lie in this grey zone that I have called ugly sex. This leads me to ask: in a moment when young girls are embracing, performing, and writing about their sexuality perhaps more than ever before, how do we escape the trap that sex is either empowering (sex positivity) or devastating (sexual assault) and carve out a space for sex that exists in-between these poles? If we want to move beyond this binary we need to take ugly sex seriously as a feminist term.

Ugly sex is not the same as non-consensual sex nor is it the same as bad sex. We might use the term “bad sex” to refer to the blurry line between consensual and non-consensual sex – like the sex that one has while intoxicated.18 But bad sex might also refer to sex that is not fulfilling. When we say “bad sex,” as Rebecca Traister does, we might be characterizing the “joyless, exploitative encounters that reflect a persistently sexist culture and can be hard to acknowledge without sounding prudish.” I agree with Traister that we exist in a “halved sexual universe, in 107 which there is either assault or there is sex positivity,” and thus we need to explore the space in between. But where Traister and I differ is that there is little to no pleasure in the grey-area sexual encounters that she discusses. I argue that ugly sex, as a distinct category, can be and often is pleasurable, if not fulfilling and also difficult (which is to say: ambivalent).

Part of the reason I have chosen the word “ugly” to describe these sexual encounters is because ugliness is an aesthetic category, defined by its opposition to the beautiful. That which is ugly is viewed as being morally offensive or repulsive; the ugly is base, degraded, and highly objectionable. Ugly sex might be offensive to “good feelings” (“Ugly,” def. 6a) while also not occupying an exclusively “bad” position. What is ugly thus holds a different connotation from the bad sex that Traister refers to, for ugly sex can bring us joy even as it makes us feel a whole host of “bad” feelings. The ugly is thus not only an aesthetic category but an affective one as well.19 Ugliness evokes feelings of fear or dread and so when I talk about ugly sex, I am referring to an experience that feels pleasurable and devastating all at once. I am also referring to how readers and critics respond to descriptions of ugly sex. As we will see with Calloway, critics tend to frame their judgments in terms of aesthetics (i.e. it is bad writing). But their criticisms arguably arise less from an aesthetic judgment than from an affective one that is rooted in how those scenes of ugly sex make the reader feel.

Ugly sex might sound a lot like the unbearable sex that Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman theorize in Sex, or the Unbearable. For Berlant and Edelman, sex (and, I would argue, any form of intimate encounter) is unbearable because it threatens our sovereignty; sex is always an encounter “with what exceeds and undoes the subject’s fantasmatic sovereignty” (2). In other words, sex reminds us that, for better or worse, we are impacted by our encounters with others. Usefully, Berlant and Edelman claim that sex is a site where “relationality is invested with hopes, expectations, and anxieties” that the subject may experience as unbearable (vii). It is for this reason that sex – any sex – cannot be divorced from negativity, which Berlant and Edelman, drawing on psychoanalysis, and the work of Jacques Lacan in particular, define as the “psychic and social incoherences and divisions, conscious and unconscious alike, that trouble any totality or fixity of identity” (vii-viii). Negativity thus works to produce the feeling of non-sovereignty that we experience in the moment of sex. Berlant and Edelman’s investment in negativity is compelling: intimacy can leave us feeling undone. 108

But being undone, encountering negativity and nonsovereignty, does not necessarily result in the shattering of the self as they also suggest. While Berlant and Edelman use self-shattering and being undone synonymously, I feel an affective and somatic difference between the two. There is something much softer about being undone. Shattering, on the other hand, requires a kind of violence – a hard object connecting with a fragile surface – and one that is much harder to repair. What might differentiate ugly sex from unbearable sex is that ugly sex as, I am theorizing it, does not shatter the subject nor does it result in the subject’s dissolution or threaten their survival. Ugly sex, I suggest, produces a refiguring of the self that imagines and enables new forms of social relation. Moreover, as we shall see, when taken up by Calloway and Fatima, ugly sex eschews the drama of shattering for the flat and the distant.

That is not to say that there are no similarities between their unbearable sex and my ugly sex. Berlant is deeply interested in sexual encounters that are puzzling and ambivalent. Differentiating herself from Edelman, she writes, “Excitement is disturbing, not devastating; ambivalent, not shattering” (125). Like Berlant, I find that Edelman’s sex without optimism and his privileging of non-sovereignty valorizes self-shattering more than I would care to and presents us with a death-driven subject that seems impossible to enact.20 I am less interested in how one is shattered by sex, and more interested in how these writers shatter normative narratives of what sex should look like, how sex should feel, and how those feelings should be described. What does it mean to tell a story that does not pathologize the desires of girls and young women? Can we address the ways in which their sexual experiences can be pleasurable and filled with shame, disgust, and other supposedly negative affects? How might our attempts to rescue these depictions of sex from the logics of pathologization shift in the absence of visual representation? It is here that we turn our attention to the role of flat affect.

In the stories I’m about to discuss, Marie and Catherine describe their sexual encounters by flattening out their affects; there is no grand, hyperbolic language, no over-the-top affect so often associated with adolescent girls and young women.21 Robbie Duschinsky and Emma Wilson note that the term “flat affect” has a long history that comes from psychiatric discourse in which flat affect “refers to an expressionless presentation … a kind of emotional opacity in which affective display, in the face in particular, has little range, intensity and mobility, and subjectively, it is not clear to the patient what the feelings they experience mean or what bearing they may have for 109 them” (185). In the scenes of flat affect that I turn to, there is emotional opacity and “little range, intensity and mobility,” but Catherine and Marie certainly understand “what the feelings they experience mean [and] what bearing they may have.” Their flat affective presentation is a conscious choice that is not the consequence of a pathology, but rather a response to the pathologizing logics used against hysterical women.

In “Structures of Unfeeling: Mysterious Skin,” Lauren Berlant infuses flat affect with agency, stressing that flat affect is a “structure of unfeeling” that privileges “underperformed emotions” over intensities of feeling (191).22 Berlant recognizes the link between flat affect and sex: her case study is the titular novel and its film adaption, which tells the story of two adolescent boys who are sexually abused and how one of them, named Neil, goes on to become a sex worker. In her analysis of Neil’s flat affect, Berlant remarks on how Neil refuses “to be exposed having a particular desire” (206). We never hear these boys express how sex makes them feel; rather, we only get to see what being sexual “looks like” (203). In Berlant’s world of flat affect, feeling must be apprehended, or sensed. In a world in which we have come to understand feeling as expression or gesture, the lack of expression found in underperformed emotion can make it all too easy to proclaim that feeling is altogether absent.

Moving away from Berlant, I argue that the expression of feeling does not negate the presence of flat affect. While Neil is invested in keeping his desire a secret, Marie and Catherine express their desires without hesitation. Affect proliferates in the content of the texts I look at, but it is much harder to locate in the tone of the writing. One might feel inclined to read this flat affect in psychiatric terms, as a consequence of trauma or other pathologies. But I want to resist this reading to argue flat affect becomes a mode through which one can push back against the all-too- easy attempts to pathologize the subject and her desires.

We can untangle the relationship between flat affect and pathology by returning to the figure of the hysteric. One of the defining features of hysteria is ambivalence, or what Freud will call “a conflict of affects” in his infamous case study of Dora (18). During his time with Dora, she will tell him that her father’s friend, Herr K., sexually assaulted her. Of course, her father refuses to believe her account and continues to invite Herr K. to their summer home to visit. Around this time, Dora will start to exhibit a variety of symptoms, including a loss of voice. In Freud’s 110 analysis, he’ll attribute these symptoms to a “reversal of affect” (22). The act of Herr K. kissing Dora should have elicited sexual excitement; instead, Dora experienced it as “unpleasurable” which then is translated into disgust (22). That Freud refuses to see Herr K.’s advance as nonconsensual should, sadly, not surprise us.23

If there’s anything we can rescue from Freud’s analysis of Dora, it’s his assertion that our desires are always deeply ambivalent. Thus Freud will remark that, “thoughts in the unconscious live very comfortably side and by side, and even contraries get on together without disputes” (54). What we can glean from this assertion is that it is not ambivalence that is the root cause of neurosis. Rather, the psychic conflicts the subject experiences are caused by the affective scripts that our social environments demand we internalize. In a world deeply invested in binaries, it is either/or not both/and. When it comes to desire, we should only experience positive affects. But what would happen if desire and repulsion could exist at the same time without leading to a conflict and thus to pathology? It is this question that the characters in Fatima and Calloway’s works take up.

If ugly sex is all about ambivalent feelings, flat affect registers ambivalence in its refusal to situate itself or to be indexed in any identifiable affective register. When it comes to flat affect, there is a refusal to dramatize the events being described, even when the events are often quite dramatic. There is no weeping, no martyrdom, no death, no “overwhelming pressures…and desires” as is the case in sentimental fiction (Berlant 2008, 47). And there is certainly no overindulgence in the “tender” emotions of pathos and sympathy that are found within the pages of sentimental fiction. Within the world of ugly sex and flat affect tenderness can be hard to find, often because it takes a form that we do not wish to call tender.24 The emotions present in Calloway and Fatima might be “underperformed,” but the ugly sex that these characters have is anything but. The flatness of their descriptions signals that they are not all that stressed about these encounters – and the reader shouldn’t be either.

Anti-hystericalism is the term I’m using to describe the investment in challenging the commonplace interpretation of symptoms (such as ambivalence, flatness, and excess) as leading to or being caused by pathology. Such an interpretation lends itself all too easily to the logic of the cure. Anti-hystericalism is not working against hysteria (as the conjunction might imply); 111 rather, this term marks a desire to push back against the history of pathology attached to hysterical women. Anti-hystericalism wants to reveal and revel in the subject’s desire for ugly sex, for flat affective description, without pathologization. Anti-hystericalism is invested in letting ambivalence, and the discomfort it might cause, just be. If anti-hystericalism is a political orientation, then flat affect is one of the aesthetic forms it takes. I’d like to turn now to Calloway’s what purpose did i serve in your life? and Catherine Fatima’s Sludge Utopia to see how these authors go about imagining worlds in which desire can be ambivalent; sex can be ugly; intimacy can be fleeting; and the subject can get off and then continue with her day.

The Marie Calloway Problem

In 2011, an unknown writer pseudonymously named Marie Calloway published an essay entitled “adrien brody” and became an Internet sensation overnight. The story was originally published as non-fiction on Calloway’s blog and included the real name of the man she slept with and a photo of his cum on her face. Calloway (age twenty-one at the time) sent the piece to alt-lit writer Tao Lin and he published it on his website, Muumuu House under the name “adrien brody,” which is the pseudonym for the forty-something writer that Calloway meets online and sleeps with in New York City. In this fictionalized account of a real story, Calloway arranges to meet up with a semi-famous literary critic (revealed to be Rob Horning on Calloway’s blog) in order to have sex. They meet up, have sex, he cums on her face, she asks him to take a photo, and the story is born.

In 2013, Calloway published a collection of first-person sexual odysseys entitled what purpose did i serve in your life. While Calloway has classified the collection as a novel, the text invites us to read it as memoir: it is Calloway’s face that stares at us on the front and back cover and the stories are infused with real life encounters between Calloway and a host of different men.

In between these black and white images of Calloway’s defiant face are thirteen stories in which the narrator, also named Marie Calloway, loses her virginity to a stranger, engages in sex work, and has a threesome with two male fans that she met on the Internet. Each story is punctuated with Marie’s age (eighteen in the first story and twenty-two in the last) and many of the stories include screenshots of Marie in various stages of undress as well as images of iPhone and 112

Facebook cybersex messages. In each of the stories, Marie recounts how she feels humiliated, objectified, and degraded during these sexual encounters – but she also feels excited.

One cannot talk about Marie Calloway without discussing the polarized response to her work. In one camp there are critics and writers who proclaim that her writing is an attempt to get attention and describe her writing as boring, flat, and without any talent. As Lisa Carver of Vice Magazine notes, Calloway has been labeled “‘a fame whore, with the accent on the whore.’ Her ‘lazy, Penthouse Letters style’ is ‘offending to real writers.’” In what purpose did i serve in your life, Calloway responds to these bad reviews and nasty online criticisms by appending these comments onto images of her own face in her essay “criticism.” The comments range from “slut,” which is superimposed over a photo of Calloway drinking coffee, to longer diatribes in which an anonymous author writes: “As a female myself I find her annoying not because she’s writing about sex or insecurities or popularity (yawn yawn yawn, that is what shitty-ass TV is for) but because she’s kind of a moron” (149) – and it goes on. By placing these comments on top of her affectless face, Calloway’s gesture resonates with her flat affective descriptions of sex. She continues to deny her readers and critics the affective responses they so desperately seek.

Others have been quick to claim that what Calloway is doing is not anything new, thus denying her any claim to creative originality. Hamilton Nolan dismissively writes: “Blah blah blah. It’s a case of internet oversharing-turned-emotionally-hurtful not seen since... I dunno, yesterday probably, when some overeager teenager somewhere sent sexy photos to some more famous man upon whom she had developed a crush. It will happen again, somewhere else, tomorrow.” In his dismissal of Calloway, Nolan fails to acknowledge that literature is rarely, if ever new. In response to Nolan’s article, and the claim that there is nothing new about Calloway’s project, Melissa Petro notes that

Seeing that women have been historically and contemporarily excluded from conversations about our bodies – and that such bodies are the epicenter of all existence, our sex being the conduit to life – I’d argue that what happens to a woman’s body – what is done to them or what we choose to do with them – holds a special significance. Our bodies are politically contested territory, and so when a woman chooses to step forward and tell her stories in the first-person, I’d say that’s pretty fucking significant. 113

Petro goes on to wonder: if there is nothing new or significant about Calloway’s writing, then why is everyone talking about it so much?25

An anonymous contributor to the now defunct literature blog HTMLGIANT sums up what they call “The Marie Calloway Problem” as follows: “we live in a society in which the mechanisms of commerce are designed to encourage us to believe that young women are randy hot sex machines, but we have a collective meltdown when one of them actually writes about sex that is anything other than vanilla. It breaks discourse. We’re that unevolved.” And the sex that Calloway has is anything but vanilla. In “bdsm” we see multiple screen shots of Marie’s iMessage exchanges. In the image on the title page for the story, Marie writes, “Mew are you going to make me cry” to which her interlocutor responds “Yes. It will be glorious” (np).26 Inside the pages of this story, there is a photo of Marie’s bruised breast and descriptions of her vomiting during the BDSM sex she has.

Marie does not just have sex: she has ugly sex and she does not appear to be too worried about the impact these encounters have on her emotional, physical, and psychic well-being. I want to look at how it’s not so much the content – Marie’s depictions of ugly sex – that has shocked and appalled readers and critics (although it certainly has). Rather, it is the way that Calloway describes these experiences via flat affect that makes critics feels so unsettled. Critics have tried to place Calloway’s writing style within a particular genre. Hazel Cills refers to “adrien brody” as a “dispassionate account” of physical intimacy, while Stephen Marche describes Calloway’s style as “calm, clinical … utterly pared down and horrifyingly bald.” Michelle Orange at Slate proclaims that Calloway “joins a new chapter in the literature of disaffection. Here self- consciousness, far from a new literary toy, has flattened into landscape, an airless plane where stunted characters pass the occasional pebble back and forth like a cold potato.” In her essay “But Is It Good? The Problem With Marie Calloway’s Affectless Realism,” Elizabeth Spiers places Calloway’s writing in a new – and problematically titled – genre called “Asperger’s realism” a term coined by critic Christian Lorentzen to describe the work of Tao Lin. Spiers locates “Asperger’s realism” within Calloway’s writing as the “suggestion of mournful detachment [which is] characterized by affectlessness and a stilted literalism that gives the impression of a semi-robotic narrator that can only convey emotion by prefacing descriptions with ‘I feel.’ This happened, then this, then this. I felt…” Pushing back against these criticisms, 114

Alexandra Molotkow offers a more capacious reading of Calloway’s style, arguing that it is “flat, declarative, and personal. It’s the language of Livejournal updates, which is as legitimate, as far as I’m concerned, as the language of leather-bound diarists etching in quill pen by candlelight.” Instead of reading Calloway’s flat affect through the category of “Asperger’s realism,” I purpose that we think about Calloway’s “dispassionate” accounts of sex more generatively, as working within anti-hystericalism.27

In order to think about how Calloway’s text embodies anti-hystericalism, I want us to look at the story that made Calloway famous: “adrien brody.” This story is much tamer than many of the others in the collection and that tameness is part of the reason why I feel that it is a more surprisingly generative site for thinking about ugly sex. On the surface, what makes “adrien brody” a story of ugly sex is that Marie messages a man that she has never met before and tells him that she wants to have sex with him when she is visiting New York City. The man is twice her age, not very attractive, and also happens to have a girlfriend, but he does not tell her that until they are en route to his apartment (103). This confession causes Marie to question the image of this man that she created, in which he “seemed to uphold human dignity and the sacredness of human feeling and connection. And so it seemed unbelievable that he would cheat” (103-4). But the disillusionment that Marie feels causes her to feel “sexually excited, because he was betraying those values” (104). Adrien Brody’s admission and his justification for not telling her (he was afraid Marie would not meet him if he told her in advance) results in a host of ambivalent feelings: disillusionment and excitement, “the feeling of being flattered” and an “abstract feeling of disgust” (104). And yet Marie tells the reader that she “couldn’t pass up the chance to sleep with [her] intellectual idol” and so she leans her head against his chest as the cab drives up to his apartment (104-5).

After arriving at Adrien Brody’s place, Marie inspects his apartment and they discuss pornography. Marie asks him to show her the porn that he looks at and is delighted when he proclaims, “I think that you can tell a lot about a person depending on what kind of porn they watch.’ ‘I always thought that too!’ I was excited someone shared my strong held belief about personality and porn habits” (107). But she’s disappointed when Adrian Brody shows her the porn he enjoys looking at, which can be found at “sodrained.tumblr.com”: “It was all pictures of modelesque brunette women posing. They didn’t look like typical pornstars, but they were all 115 very thin and kind of generic looking. And there was the usual feeling of objectification in the photos. So I judged him” (108). Marie is acutely aware of the ways that men objectify women and at every moment during their sexual encounter, she is aware of her position in their exchange, at one point remarking, as she gives him a blow job, “I’ve never been able to figure out why I get off on being used as an object” (112). A page later she explains how she feels frustrated by how “strange and unfair” it is that “the possibility of sex relies on just one thing, the man’s ability to get an erection” (113). She goes on to tell the reader that “I thought then how it’s really unfair how men want and expect you to be really slutty and wild in bed, but they then laugh at you for it. You’re either frigid and boring or you’re unintentionally funny and crazy” (113). Marie has a hard time figuring out how to occupy a space in between these poles, which leads her to admit: “I’m totally powerless in the face of men” (138). It is worth noting that she makes this statement right after slapping Adrien Brody’s face.

While Marie has moments of feeling powerless or threatened in front of men, she is also an active player in her sexual exchanges, making requests that it would be all to easy to judge as a reflection of her own disempowerment. The perfect exemplar of this would be the infamous scene in which Adrien Brody cums on Marie’s face. It is unclear who brought up the idea, but it is Marie who feels “vaguely annoyed” at her partner’s ambivalence. Her feelings of annoyance continue after the act has taken place, when Adrien Brody tells her, with his voice shaking, “I feel so vulnerable” (115). Marie, with great poignancy and flat affect, states “I felt annoyed that he was only focused on his own feelings, after he had just shot a load in my face.” In an attempt to shift the focus back onto her self, she asks him to take a photo of her with his cum still on her face (115). And he acquiesces without asking why she would want the photo in the first place.

Marie might feel powerless in the face of men, but here we can see her adjusting her relation to the face, turning it into a site where she can encounter her desire. And her desire for ugly sex is nowhere better embodied than in the cum drying on Marie’s face. Marie refuses to make much, if anything, of the fact that Adrien Brody just came on her face. Instead of getting up to wash her face, and thus washing away her desire, Marie lets the cum dry, as she and Adrien Brody “talked more about Gramsci, and then our feelings” (115). Marie wonders how Adrien Brody could respect her and “have this intelligent conversation with me, when I was laying there with his cum 116 all over my face” (115). Marie’s flat affect turns this scene of ugly sex into a moment of morbid comedy, where the act of sex is almost instantly forgotten, but still lingers on Marie’s face.

When she does get up to wash it off, she grabs his hand and brings him with her to the bathroom: “Come with me” she commands him. Marie transforms the act of cumming on her into an act of coming with her. She wants him to witness this act. By bringing Adrien Brody into the bathroom with her, Marie’s act of washing becomes an intimate encounter, with both Adrien Brody and her desire. This act can be read as an instance of what Marie refers to as “an elaborate strategy of purification, to blend honesty and revulsion until they are no longer separable” (139). What makes this strategy elaborate is that this ritual of purification refuses to rid itself of revulsion. While Marie might literally wash the cum off her face, her act of washing beside Adrien Brody can be seen as an attempt to blend the honesty of her desire with revulsion or a sense of self- loathing.

Marie’s articulation of this purification strategy comes at the very end of “adrien brody,” in a disarming moment of metafictional self-reflection and narrative dissociation. Marie shifts into third person to describe and perhaps even attempt to explain her desire to the reader. It is worth quoting her in full:

She works under an assumed name. She once wished she were in Japan, but now she subjects her fascination with Japanese culture—its preoccupation with reified cuteness, with fastidiousness, with compliant femininity—to elaborate scrutiny, with a variety of unconventional tools: submersion, revulsion, role-playing, obsession, ridicule, mimicry. She writes with stark and troubling ambivalence. It can be easily misread as apathy, numbness; this is part of what she risks. An elaborate strategy of purification, to blend honesty and revulsion until they are no longer separable, until readers must begin to shut down themselves. She is sure enough of herself to confront and even invite misunderstanding, as though misunderstanding might offer a way forward toward an authenticity beyond the deceptive surfaces of exhibitionism. (139)

Marie does not judge her fascination with Japanese culture – it is worth noting here that Calloway is part Japanese – or its preoccupations. When she uses the term “scrutinize” she is not 117 referring to an act of critical judgment. Rather, she uses the term to denote the act of “looking searchingly at something; a searching gaze” (OED).

The tools she uses – submersion, revulsion, role-playing, obsession, ridicule, mimicry – are, we are told, “unconventional.” Instead of distancing herself from this fascination with reified cuteness, with fastidiousness, with compliant femininity, Marie opts instead to immerse herself in these forms of idealized femininity, through submersion, role-playing, obsession, and mimicry. And in fact, when Marie recognizes that Adrien Brody is nervous, she reenacts a scene from Japanese pornography that she had once watched, in order to help make him cum: “I opened my eyes and looked into his and smiled” (115).

When she comes face to face with her desire, which for Marie is located in the ambivalence of ugly sex, in the complicated and at times disturbing nature of the sex she engages in, she becomes privy to the fact that desire and repulsion are intimately linked – not just for her, but also for all subjects. What we see in Calloway’s collection is that when it comes to ugly sex, the repulsion you feel in the moment might be an integral element of your desire and thus increase your feelings of attraction. In fact, one might even desire the same thing she finds repulsive. Calloway approaches her desire – embodied in the ugly sex she has – through a flat affect and in so doing, she refuses to pathologize herself. Her flat affect just lets her desires be.

Marie is aware of the ambivalence running throughout her sexual encounters and she understands how that ambivalence might trouble the reader, might cause them to read her as numb or apathetic. This is, indeed, one of the risks of flat affect and anti-hystericalism. Marie wants to make emotions and desires unintelligible to the point where the reader shuts down. And to shut down implies that one becomes disaffected, for how can one feel anything in such a state? While Marie articulates her project of describing ugly sex via flat affect, she recognizes the potential that such a project holds: “misunderstanding,” she writes, “might offer a way forward toward an authenticity beyond the deceptive surfaces of exhibitionism.” Marie’s statement is reminiscent of the psychoanalytic axiom that truth emerges from the mistake. Marie is asking us to read below the deceptive surfaces, to get underneath the symptom and our desire to cure hysteria, and come face to face with the authenticity that lies below. Confronting the 118 ambivalence of Marie’s desires then, can lead to an encounter with the truth of one’s desire – and that truth might just be that one’s desires are just as ambivalent as Marie’s.

Getting off on the Sludge

Like Marie, Catherine is also concerned with better understanding her desire, and what she finds is that it’s quite ugly. The twenty-something narrator of Catherine Fatima’s debut novel Sludge Utopia discloses how: “If I’m not turning people against themselves, I’m not turned on for a minute. The core of my sexual identity if fucking rotten … Should it be any wonder that I am orgasmically impotent with others despite performing with no trouble when I’m alone?” (81). Fatima’s novel is also a work of autofiction, a diary catalogue of her sexual encounters: some with men she desires, some who are giving her a place to stay, and others who she is merely sleeping with, she tells us, to stave off boredom. At best, the experience is pleasurable, but lacking orgasm; at worst, the sex leaves her feeling “not terribly affected by last night’s discomfort” (92) – and that, it appears, is good enough for her.

Taking place over the span of a year and broken into six sections – stimulation, depression, utopia, family, love, and sludge – Sludge Utopia is Catherine’s personal diary. Recalling the pages of young girls’ diaries everywhere, some of the entries read like a disconnected list of events: “Trip away to NYC with Caroline; no personal writing; little time alone; no screens after certain hours. It was a lovely trip. We did lots. All introspection was shared outwards. We: took bus; arrived to Penn Station” and the list goes on (12-13). Much of her diary is comprised of her attempts to process her ambivalent desires while living under late capitalism and just prior to the eruption of the #metoo movement.28

Catherine grapples with what it means to come of age as this particular historical moment, leading her to proclaim that

the primary ethical conundrum of a woman’s sexual life is how to take the reality of a world that does not work in her favour—a world of desire that subjugates her—and learn to get off on this, while behaving in a manner that is ethical such that, perhaps, you might change the landscape of sexual desire for women who come up after you. (25) 119

Catherine’s “primary ethical conundrum” highlights how the world of Sludge Utopia is one of cruel optimism – a term coined by Lauren Berlant in her book of the same title. For Berlant, cruel optimism describes how the objects we desire, which we believe will help us flourish, actually prevent us from doing so.29 Grounded in our neoliberal moment, Berlant’s concept might be best described by the ongoing investment in the American Dream. This ideology tells us that if we work hard enough we can overcome the obstacles and become financially successful. We’ll get the house, the two cars, the family plus dog. If the world knocks us down, we just have to pick ourselves up again and keep going. The American Dream masks the reality that the world is unjust and that it doesn’t matter how hard we work because systemic inequalities will keep us down. But the cost of seeing the American Dream for what it is – a fantasy – is just too high, for the American Dream keeps the subject going. In an interview with Book*hug’s Mary Ann Matias, Fatima evokes Berlant to explain how: “I would like to help in the global effort to overthrow capitalism, and detail some of the relational and emotional ties which keep people bound to it and its dehumanizing effects. This is the goal: to make sensible the ways in which ideological attachments become personal attachments, and the way those attachments inform one’s most intimate experience.”

Given the landscape of late capitalism, in which “ideological attachments” must become “personal attachments” in order for the subject (and for capitalism) to survive, it makes sense that Catherine chooses to embrace cruel optimism and get off on porn, despite finding it “tacky and ugly” (23). Catherine rejects the anti-porn arguments of second-wave feminists discussed earlier. Unlike the second-wave feminists involved in the pornography wars, Catherine’s central concern with porn is that it has made it impossible for her to get off during sex with others: “It’s so hard to tell someone, in order for me to come, you’d have to leave the room” (174). And so at various points in the novel, Catherine gives up pornography, committing herself to getting off on the material of her imagination, before lapsing back into her former habits, remarking that “train[ing] myself to get off with him, and on being with him” will not be “the cure to my relational life” (84). But perhaps getting off on ugly sex will get her closer to the kinds of intimate relationships she wants to foster.

During her summer abroad in France, she describes a major success: she got herself off on the image of a sexual encounter she’d had with a young man. Here’s the catch: she doesn’t feel 120 sexually attracted to him. Catherine describes Claude as “physically beautiful, mostly just the ways I like … He’s smart, and sometimes very stimulating for me, but there’s just something. There’s a certain warmth toward him I lack totally” (90). Catherine is confounded by her lack of feeling towards Claude: “I could give this lack of attraction reasons—sometimes I think he is a bit emotionally stupid, unaware, patronizing, not always respectful—but these qualities have not stopped me from being attracted to others!” (90). Catherine is left wondering if the reason is rooted in “all his free avowal of affection for and attraction to me, I don’t see any vulnerability in him” (90). For Catherine, Claude’s ease with verbal affirmation – something that she lacks – marks him as an invulnerable subject.

Despite all this, Catherine will describe how much she enjoyed being kissed by Claude: “He kisses in a way that’s compatible with me, and he held me with a force I liked a lot” (91). But this kiss leads to anxiety as Catherine and Claude return to his apartment: “I had no idea how to return to his apartment and not fuck him since I’d been active in kissing” (91). Like Margot, Catherine worries that she’s set up false expectations; but instead of going through with the act, Catherine responds “passively and gracelessly”: “I just stopped responding to anything” (91). And so while Claude continues “kissing and humping for so much longer than I would have expected without garnering a response” Catherine realizes that her lack of sexual attraction might be less about Claude’s lack of vulnerability and more to do with the fact that he “is the sort of person who can go on like this” totally unaware of her lack of desire (91). In fact, what Catherine wishes for is “improvised affectedness,” which, as far as I can understand, would be the exact opposite of vulnerability (92).

After numerous advances, Catherine finally gives in and lets Claude suck her breasts. The experience is far from satisfactory. Despite that, she writes: “Though the encounter itself had made me feel unhappy and uncomfortable, I retained the visual stimulus of Claude’s sustained suckle. I came not to the video, but to this, with my eyes closed!” (103). The “sustained suckle” leaves her feeling detached from her own body and produces the feelings of unhappiness and discomfort. Catherine’s ability to get off on this sexual encounter is inextricably linked to those ugly feelings and to the lack of pleasure she experienced during the encounter itself. 121

It would be all too easy to ask why Catherine submits herself, time and time again, to sex with men like Claude and all of the other “emotionally debilitated, predatory fucker[s] in life” (102). Like Margot, Catherine often finds herself forced with making a choice in which neither outcome is ideal. In a parenthetical aside Catherine explains:

(I have spent time with and fucked someone I dislike and disrespect, not because there was some truth there, nor because I had to, but because I chose to against other options [boredom, a public nap, the cold that would likely result therefrom], and it has neither changed me nor proven that I’m different from what I had thought before.) (102)

For Catherine, the stakes aren’t as high as they were for Margot: boredom or ugly sex? What both writers illuminate is how the world we live in doesn’t offer women the choices they deserve – and this truth is something we can only speak of in a parenthetical aside. When presented with undesirable options, Catherine states that perhaps all you can do, is “Take your pleasures where you can,” knowing that “when the better world dawns, there will be better pleasures, too” (134). For the time being, Catherine must confront the fact that she rarely achieves orgasm during sex because the fantasy world of pornography offers her the disaffected distance she needs.

Exhausted by the pressure of constantly interrogating her desires, it doesn’t take long before Catherine tells the reader: “I’m over trying to find some motive for my sexual desire or lack of it” (162). Catherine provides an imperative (whether it’s for the reader or for herself is unclear): “Spend less time interrogating your ambivalence” (194). Her best hope, for now, is that she can “live, still, an entire life dealing with the disappointment and difficulties upon which such an unpleasant fantasy could be founded in the first place” (26-7). The unpleasant fantasy that Catherine refers to here is Freud’s belief he could have cured Dora. While Catherine accepts Freud’s reading that Dora’s hysteria is caused by her desire for Herr K., she notes that there “is so much objectionable content in Dora (so much), but perhaps the worst is that Freud attests— maybe even in earnest—that if Dora hadn’t left treatment just on the brink of his simple breakthrough, she might have been ‘cured’ of her hysteria” (25). Catherine does not explain why she takes issue with this claim in particular. I’d like to argue that Catherine’s rejection illuminates her own investment in anti-hystericalism. For even if Freud could “cure” Dora of this desire, she’d still have to live in a world that made that desire possible in the first place. 122

If Catherine, like Dora, will have to encounter myriad “disappointments and difficulties” that are part and parcel to being a woman living in a patriarchal world then she might as we well embrace the ambivalent nature of her sexual desire and admit that she’d much rather get off on the sludge than the utopia. “On all my most optimistic days,” she writes, “I try to come to abstract notions of what’s right and good, but it’s hard to bring about a climax from this” (216). She goes on:

What good masturbatory material is made of light? My orgasms come only from darkness. They have not come from the playfulness of the sexual encounters that have made me feel most utopian … I don’t like what I come to. I needn’t. There’s always shame, envy, dominance … I love a sexual encounter that feels friendly and fun because it suits my values, but I never masturbate to “friendly and fun.” I masturbate to things getting very uncomfortable. I want to like the sex I desire in my utopian mind, but I come instead to the sludge … Maybe shame is what I feel, so I like the fantasies that make use of it. Let sex bring you into the gloom of your psyche, just like in your masturbation fantasies. Maybe then there will be concordance. Maybe then there will be orgasms. (216-7)

This moment of disclosure is refreshing in its honesty. Coming at the end of the book, it might have been all too easy to hope that Catherine would say “no” to ugly sex. To see this embrace of the sludge might feel disappointing. And yet, just as Catherine “masturbate[s] to things getting very uncomfortable,” (217) she invites the reader to find some pleasure in the gloominess of the book’s ending.

The ending of Sludge Utopia might leave the reader wondering: where do we go from here? While I understand the impulse that drives this question – it is hard to find Catherine’s subject position desirable – I wonder if that question brings us dangerously close to the impulse to “cure” the subject, to make her desires more in line with the status quo. Perhaps the only place to go from here is to process the discomfort that these texts make us feel. In the final section of this chapter, I propose that pushing past this discomfort – without resolving it – can enable us to imagine different intimacies to come. I am, of course, playing on two meanings of “come” here. Recalling how Marie fosters an intimate relationship with the cum on her face, these intimacies to come are made possible vis-à-vis ugly sex. 123

Intimacy to Come

The final story in what purpose did i serve in your life? is entitled “thank you for touching me,” in which Marie recounts a threesome that she has with two men that she’s only ever interacted with on the internet. All three happen to be in New York at the same time, so Kip and Christopher come to Marie’s hotel room at 2am without – at least as far as Marie knows – any intention to have sex. But the possibility of ugly sex is there from the beginning. When asked by Christopher, “‘What’s the best and the worst thing that’s happened to you in New York?’” Marie responds, “‘I threw up in my friend’s bed.’” Christopher asks for clarification: “‘Was that the best or the worst thing?’” and Marie responds: “‘It was kind of both’” (231-2). We’re never told the rest of the story, but Marie’s response is an all too apt articulation of the intimacy to come, as she proceeds to have sex with Kip and Christopher on the hotel bed. As Christopher fucks Marie, Kip “stuck his tongue so far down my throat that I gagged, which I liked” (234).

Marie describes her confusion and the ambivalence running throughout this encounter. While at first only engaging with Kip as Christopher was “shuffling around the hotel room,” Marie wonders “if [she] was more uncomfortable or excited” (233). When Kip and Christopher switch off, Marie describes how “I felt incredibly embarrassed yet excited that I was being fucked while Kip watched” (234). Once Kip and Christopher are both touching her, Marie recounts how “The feeling of having two men touch me at the same time was strange; it was pleasurable and interesting because it was a totally new sensation, but it was also overwhelming to the point that I sought to disassociate. And it was tainted by the worry that afterwards they would think less of me” (234). Marie’s fear brings us back to Margot’s: that if she doesn’t have sex with Robert he’ll think less of her. Marie, on the other hand, is afraid that going through with the act will cause Kip and Christopher to think less of her. And so both women are trapped, not by their desires, but how others will judge their desires after the fact.

Despite feeling “scared because of some more intimate fear,” Marie escalates the threesome by asking the men to be mean to her (237). She does not want to reconcile her ambivalent desire for ugly sex. Marie describes how “I had changed my way of thinking recently to enjoy the humiliation and control of being used in that way, though afterwards it left me feeling extremely used. I had actively adjusted my sexuality so that it was more compatible with a common male sexual urge. I was overwhelmed with embarrassment and shame and excitement” (237). Despite 124 her acknowledgment that she has adjusted her sexuality to be more in line with male sexual urges, Marie still finds that she is excited in these moments. Even as she is overwhelmed with this spectrum of feelings, Marie does not see this as a reason to stop her from further ugly sexual encounters.

In fact, the only thing that might get in the way is the performance of intimacy on the part of those she sleeps with. As Marie, Kip, and Christopher wait for a cab together, Marie expresses irritation when “Kip hugged and kissed me on the head and then my cheek”: “I felt upset and irritated. I didn’t want him to be affectionate towards me, to pretend to feel any sort of emotion towards me” (239). This act of disingenuous affect (with its false promise of ongoing intimacy) taints the all-too-real encounter with her desire (the intimacy to come) in the hotel bedroom. While the title of the story, “thank you for touching me,” expresses gratitude for the sexual encounter, it marks an endpoint as well. Marie has no pretension of keeping in touch with Christopher and Kip. In a moment of quiet reflection, Marie sits in between Christopher and Kip in the cab: “Kip lay his head on my shoulders, and I leaned against Christopher. I wondered when I would stop abusing myself for the sake of new experiences, new sensations. No one talked during the cab ride” (240). With her body touching Kip and Christopher for the last time, all Marie wants to think about is herself, of whether the intimacies to come – “new experiences, new sensations” – can only be made possible by “abusing myself.” This question remains open. In the final line of the story, Christopher hugs and kisses Marie and says goodbye: “‘Have a lovely trip back to wherever it is you are going’” (240). That Marie’s destination remains unknown reflects how Marie’s desire is similarly marked by indefiniteness.

The end of Sludge Utopia is also marked by the indefinite. After quoting Adam Phillips, who writes, “‘Our utopias tells us more about our lived lives and privations than about our wished-for lives,’” Catherine explains, “If I read about a hypothetical program for life all mapped out, I see it less for what it will produce than for what it details that I recognize I do not have. I see it sketch out what I’m missing. More importantly, I see it sketch out what I’m missing regardless of whether or not it’s something I want” (218). Catherine does not want a destination, something to long for. Rather, she wants to focus on where she is in the present. Just as we’re not told Marie’s destination or whether or not she’ll stop abusing herself for new experiences, we’re 125 never told what it is that’s missing for Catherine. And in some ways, that’s the point. For what’s really at stake is whether she wants what’s missing to begin with.

Let’s say that the thing that’s missing is the intimacy we’re told we can have in romantic partnerships. Sludge Utopia ends with Catherine and her boyfriend breaking up and Catherine proclaiming, “I don’t care about being lovable. I’d prefer to be strong, focused, self-sufficient, and perhaps a bit unruly, too. Onward, forward, to being alone, and to otherwise being only with people I crave” (216). Catherine has said no to the intimacy promised by the long-term relationship with Max. Instead, she wants to think about the intimacy to come with those she desires. Catherine wants to reject the narrative that sexual enjoyment requires a particular fantasy of intimacy: “If I never miss Noah, if I never fantasize about sex with him again—did I still enjoy the way his dick felt inside me?” (122). Catherine’s question reflects the ways that short- term, fleeting encounters are emptied out of any value – here, the pleasure of Noah’s dick inside of Catherine – as we continue to prioritize emotional connection and the feeling of missing that then leads to future encounters with that person. In this chapter, I’ve argued that we need to create a space for sexual encounters that do not depend on emotional connection in order to be meaningful. And it is this kind of encounter that Catherine wants: “sexual pleasure without the vulnerability that it has usually relied on” (122). The “vulnerability that it has usually relied on” is the vulnerability we experience in romantic partnerships. Recalling Berlant and Edelman, there is no sexual encounter in which we’re not forced to confront our own non-sovereignty. But there is a way to shift the site of vulnerability, if we stop placing romantic connection on a pedestal, with sexual connection sitting below it.

Catherine offers her own articulation of non-sovereignty and vulnerability when she asks: “How much of ambivalence is really just being terrified of another’s departure or choice against you? How easily can you act the way you really want when you know you’ve both consented in some way to being trapped?” (163). The answer to her first question comes easily: a lot! The answer to the second question is a bit harder. If the act of trapping is defined as preventing someone from escaping or leaving, then it’s hard to imagine how consent operates in this paradigm. We could return here to the arguments made by Cruz, Rodríguez, and others to think about how Catherine’s question is exactly what’s at stake in BSDM sex. But I’d like to shift away from the terrain of sex here to argue that if ugly sex comprises feelings of revulsion and attraction, 126 perhaps intimacy is made up of the oscillation between consenting and trapping: in the most intense moments of feeling trapped, we might feel like consent has dropped out of the picture; and in the most elated states of consent, we forget that intimacy is an act of consenting to being trapped – even if just for a moment.

Rodríguez makes a similar claim in Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings: “Sex is always implicated in shifting (im)possibilities of consent and coercion” (185). Rodríguez goes on to point out how this logic also structures our romantic relationships as well, citing Elizabeth Povinelli who writes: “One of the major distinguishing features of modern intimacy is an expectation of a blurring of choice and compulsion in the context of love, of a dynamic among self-risk and self-elaboration, personal transcendence, and the fall back onto the self. Indeed, love thematizes and indicates the affective site where choice and compulsion are blurred” (228-9). It is this blurry state that Catherine cannot accept – at least not under the conditions upon which this intimacy is offered.

In the section entitled “Love,” Catherine grapples with this ambivalence in her relationship with Max. When she returns home from France, Catherine’s friend Max is still subletting her apartment. When Max asks if he can stay a little longer, Catherine agrees, and eventually the two slip into a relationship. At first, she’s deeply ambivalent: “Living with Max is comforting but it makes me very sad. I think he’s lovable, but I alternately, on occasion, find him lamentable or resentable” (164). But then she finds herself in bed with Max and in the middle of the night, when he asks her, “‘Are we in love?’” she responds, “‘We are’” (177). This proclamation comes right after Catherine’s reflection that, “It’s difficult to accept—or not be menaced by—the prospect that you can be whatever you’d like, even with someone else in the room. Someone can know all ostensibly knowable things about you (family life, dating history, eating habits, writing style, grooming habits) and still not inhibit or constrain you” (177). Catherine can be whomever she likes during sex, but it’s harder for her to imagine that this is possible in her romantic partnerships. And yet, with Max, it appears that she might be getting closer to accepting that possibility: “Honestly, I’d never known it was possible to be so consumed while being so unafraid and unselfconscious. Until now, I’d only thought consumption was fear and self- consciousness. I suppose this is what people are talking about (when they are talking about [love])” (186). Even though it might look as though Catherine is reconceptualizing what is 127 possible in romantic relationships, the fact that Catherine must bury the word love within two sets of parentheses illuminates her desire to keep love bracketed and separate from the feeling of consumption that she loves so much in her sexual encounters.

Catherine will eventually declare that she doesn’t need anyone’s love (210). For Catherine, “Being wanted is worse than being unwanted” (213). And so after her and Max break up, Catherine chooses to be alone. Or, not exactly alone: “I can’t wait to start fucking again. I get to fuck again! … And then those people will leave my house! They will leave my house after we’ve really fucked each other! All the world will be new again!” (216). While Catherine describes her desires as “not quite prosocial,” (217) they’re not anti-social either; while she may not “care about being lovable” she would still like to be “with people I crave” (216). Instead of pathologizing her inability (or lack of desire) to sustain prolonged intimacy, we could see the reparative potential in the fleeting sexual encounters that enable her to fuck and then be left alone. There is safety in knowing that this encounter’s life is brief. Catherine wants “to open up new ways to think about desire” (89) in which “what turns on doesn’t obey optimism or ethics” (103). It is in the space of ugly sex that the “demands of the interpersonal” (95) can loosen their hold just enough for Catherine to imagine the ambivalent forms that intimacy can take.

Perhaps Catherine has solved “the primary ethical conundrum of a woman’s sexual life” after all (25). In a “world that does not work in her favour,” she’s figured out how to get off on the sludge. While she’s given up interrogating her desires, the world around her has not. What Catherine recognizes is that in refusing to pathologize the desire for ugly sex, “you might change the landscape of sexual desire for women who come up after you” (25). This landscape makes use of the shame that women have been taught to feel and revels in it. The source of this shame is twofold: shame for having ugly sex, and shame for choosing to be single. For what is more dangerous than the single-woman who wants to have all of the sex, but none of the intimacy promised by the long-term partnership?

In his essay “On Narcissism,” Freud claims that “we must begin to love in order that we may not fall ill, and must fall ill if, in consequence of frustration, we cannot love” (85). If, under Freud’s formulation, to resist love and opt instead for desire is to fall ill, then Catherine and Marie are sick indeed. And yet, as I’ve been trying to show throughout this dissertation, the source of that 128 sickness does not come from within. Rather, we are sick because the world is sick. Even if Freud could have cured Dora, what Catherine recognizes is that the probability of relapsing into sickness is high. In some ways, the tongue-and-cheek title of Calloways’ final story, “thank you for touching me” is an acknowledgment that it is a blessing to still be touched. In a world that pathologizes your desire for ugly sex and your lack of desire for sustained and enduring intimacy, these moments of being touched help us imagine new forms of intimacy to come.

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Chapter Notes

1 Kristen Roupenian has since published “Cat Person” in her short story collection, You Know You Want This, and so I’ll be using the citations from her book.

2 In using this the term “dissociate,” I want to acknowledge how this term defines a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder. Within the context of “Cat Person,” we’re not given any information that Margot suffers from PTSD and so I use this word with some reticence, as I do not wish to diagnose a character. And yet, this is exactly what so many women have to do to get through sexual encounters that they don’t actually want to be in. Thus dissociating is a survival strategy for all of those living under (literally and figuratively) the patriarchy.

3 There are too many examples to cite, but here are a choice few found via @MenCatPerson, an account created to share men’s responses to “Cat Person.” “Obscenely vain young woman uses man to fulfill power/degradation fantasy – yet he is at fault for naively lashing out in the face of cruel disrespect. Way to contort poor erotic fiction into a vague ‘feminist’ treatise on why the word whore is somehow worse than demoralizing condescension” tweets Jay Eagles. Joseph W Borawski summarizes the story: “TLDR: Ghosting is bad. Just tell people the truth. Don’t be a coward.” And @sbzerski offers his own take on “Cat Person”: “Judgmental, egotistical girl hooks up with guy that she finds physically unattractive. They have sex before they establish any emotional connection. Unsurprisingly the loveless act is sad and depressing.”

4 And he wasn’t the only one who was confused. @JFalschung: “It all seems very mundane to me. I don’t get it”; @ArthurAugustyn asked: “Can you direct me toward the appeal of this piece? It’s written well and a lot of it is relatable but it’s also immensely frustrating.”

5 In their 2013 study, the World Health Organization noted that 70% of the women who’ve experienced physical and/or sexual violence were the victims of intimate-partner violence (IPV). K. M. Devries et al. support these findings, claiming that the most common form of violence that women experience is from an intimate partner. IPV has been recognized as a significant public health problem, with M. J. Breiding et al. showing that 1 out of 10 women in the United States 130

has been raped by an intimate partner and 16.9% of women have experienced sexual violence other than rape, while 24% of women have experienced physical IPV.

6 Thankfully, Robyn Pennacchia responded for women everywhere when she wrote back to Kyle Smith. The most brilliant part of Pennacchia’s response is the revelation that Smith once wrote a novel “about a man who drinks a lot and has sex with a lot of women, and who, for some reason, has a lot of refrigerator issues.” Pennacchia asks: “Are you concerned for him, Kyle? Are you worried about his life choices? Why did you not, instead, choose to write a story about a human person who makes literally all of the right life choices and had everything turn out great?” These questions from Pennacchia point out how so many men have responded to Margot as though she’s a real person, rather than a fictional character, referring to “Cat Person” as an essay or article. Moreover, by quoting from Smith’s own story of a flawed narrator who engages in the same behaviours as Margot, Pennacchia draws attention to a double standard: men’s flawed behaviour is seen as “relatable,” while women who make bad choices are criticized.

7 Sudjic goes on to explain how “Even once the category had been clarified the assumption remained that Roupenian’s story was, in all its naturalistic, banal detail, merely the transcribing of actual events in its author’s life … To many readers, Roupenian was the passive vessel for a story which happened to her, not an author which happened to the story” (97).

8 While autofiction has been on the rise in the last decade, Christian Lorentez notes that the word “autofiction” was first used in a blurb on the back of the French novelist Serge Doubrovsky’s book Fils in the late 1970s: “Autobiography? No, that is a privilege reserved for the important people of this world, at the end of their lives, in a refined style. Fiction, of events and facts strictly real; autofiction, if you will.” Jonathan Sturgeon argues that while the genre of autofiction isn’t new, we’re entering into a new stage of autofictional writing: “The new class of autofictions, on the other hand, having passed through modernism’s Joycean and Proustian portraits of artists, as well as the defiant relativism of postmodernism and post-structuralist theory, eschews the entire truth vs. fiction debate in favor of the question of how to live or how to create.” The new autofictional novel is, according to Sturgeon, “an oeuvre of the soul.” Some examples of contemporary autofiction include Shelia Heti’s How Should a Person Be? and Motherhood and Karl Ove Knassguard’s multivolume opus My Struggle. 131

9 For a discussion of ambivalent desires in lesbian relationships, see Lisa Duggan’s Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence, and American Modernity. To see the ways that the emerging field of sexology pathologized the lesbian murder story, see chapter 6: “Doctors of Desire.”

10 This is precisely the project of Michael Cobb’s Single: Arguments for the Uncoupled. In the introduction, Cobb reflects on the queer nature of those who are single, noting a desire to “provoke serious reflection on why ‘relationships’ and ‘coupledom’ were so unquestionably considered better than singledom” (5).

11 See pages 157-63 in Rubin’s “Thinking Sex” for a discussion of obscenity laws, age-of- consent laws, and other legal prohibitions regarding sexual acts, as well as pages 175-6 for more on sex laws pertaining to S/M practices.

12 See The Philosophy of Pornography: Contemporary Perspectives edited by Lindsay Coleman and Jacob M. Held, and in particular: “Diagnoses of Transformation: ‘Pornification,’ Digital Media, and the Diversification of the Pornographic” by Susanna Paasonen and Susan J. Brison’s “‘The Price We Pay’? Pornography and Harm,” in which she defines pornography along the same lines as Dworkin and MacKinnon as “violent degrading misogynistic hate speech” (91).

13 In drawing on the claims made by queer women of color to support my own reading of the heterosexual (and thus seemingly non-queer) sexual relations of cisgender white women in this chapter, I wish to acknowledge the ways in which queer women of color are, more often than naught, the ones leading the charge when it comes to finding ways to flourish under the white, heteropatriarchial, ableist, colonial bindings of the neoliberal nation-state.

14 For more on the ethical and philosophical concerns surrounding Black women’s participation in BDSM practices and its historical roots, see pages 34-40.

15 See also: Jennifer Nash, The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography (2- 3).

16 For readings of erotic and/or pornographic literature, see Amber Jamilla Musser’s discussion of The Story of O in the second chapter of Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism. 132

Interestingly, Musser locates ambivalence in the sensation of coldness, which “illuminates the disempowerment of affective detachment while preserving a veneer of agency” (75). Drawing on the work of Simone de Beauvoir, Musser notes that coldness comes at a cost: “[Beauvoir] argues that maternity and coldness are detrimental for women because they are states where women are trapped in alienated bodies without hope of transcendence” (76). But for Musser, coldness can enable us to “locate pockets of agency within this world” as the affective distance it requires enables us to separate other’s desires from our own (82).

17 For more on the problems women face when writing about their lives, see: Modern Confessional Writing: New Critical Essays edited by Jo Gill and especially Leah Guenther’s essay “Bridget Jones’s Diary: Confessing Post-Feminism”; Irene Gammel’s Confessional Politics; Leigh Gilmore’s Autobiographics; and Rita Felski’s Beyond Feminist Aesthetics.

18 See Katie Roiphe’s The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism.

19 See Sianne Ngai’s seminal text Ugly Feelings.

20 Ruti poignantly asks in The Ethics of Opting Out: “This is why my levelheaded response to queer theory’s idealization of nonsovereignty is: If you can’t put your theory into practice, if you aren’t willing to destroy the very foundations of your existence, then why is the death of the subject such a goal for you? Essentially, my question is: If you’re not gonna do it, why are you even talking about it?” (47).

21 For more on the presence of emotions in teen-girl language (written and spoken), please see: Witmer and Katzman; Huffaker and Calvert; and Tagliamonte and Denis.

22 Berlant is playing off of Raymond Williams’ phrase “structure of feeling.” In “Structure of Feeling and Selective Tradition,” published in 1961, Williams describes structure of feeling as “operat[ing] in the most delicate and least tangible parts of our activity. In one sense, this structure of feeling is the culture of a period: it is the particular living result of all the elements in the general organization” (30). We can understand the structure of feeling as denoting that ineffable, unnamable quality of a particular time and place, a sort of cultural zeitgeist. 133

23 I spend a great deal of time unpacking how Freud’s fundamental misreading of Dora’s experience is profoundly problematic and deeply troubling in Chapter 1. See pages 17-21.

24 I can’t help but think of the act of tenderizing a piece of meat, which is quite violent and gory, a form of injury that recalls the ways in which that which is tender is defined as being: “Soft or delicate in texture or consistence; yielding easily to force or pressure; fragile; easily broken, divided, compressed, or injured; of food, easily masticated, succulent” (OED).

25 This article can no longer be found online, as xoJane shut down at the end of 2016.

26 There are five stories in what purpose did i serve in your life that are lacking pagination: “criticism,” “cybersex,” “men,” “insufferable” and “bdsm.” All of these stories are made up of online chat or iMessage exchanges between Marie and different men, thus one could read the lack of pagination as an attempt to create a virtual, online story that pushes back against the conventions of the book form.

27 Anti-hystericalism is not to be confused with “hysterical realism,” a term coined by literary critic James Wood and defined as a big ambitious novel – like David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest or Zadie Smith’s White Teeth – which “pursues vitality at all costs [and] knows a thousand things but does not know a single human being.” For Wood, what is lacking in these novels is feeling because they are, supposedly, too concerned with being clever.

28 The #metoo movement gained traction when Charlize Theron, Alyssa Milano, and other actors stepped up to accuse Harvey Weinstein of sexual abuse in October 2017 on Twitter. But the movement was actually started by Tarana Burke, a civil rights activist, in 2006. Burke started to use the phrase “Me Too” on Myspace as a way to respond to the marginalized girls and women in underserviced communities. In an interview with Rachel Leah at Salon Magazine, Burke explains: “This was a movement that was started for marginalized people … This was work that was started for people who didn’t have access to resources and for people whose voices were not listed when we talk about survivors.” 134

29 “Cruel optimism is the condition of maintaining an attachment to a significantly problematic object,” writes Berlant (24). These problematic objects are fantasies of the good life promised by late capitalism, and include upward mobility, the couple form/romantic love, and the political itself (2).

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Chapter 4: Hysteria’s Ghosts: Chronic Illness & Collective Care

A Scene from the Sick Bed

In the fall of 2017, I posted a photo to Instagram (see fig. 1): “Trying to not panic by taking selfies so you can see what I look like as a cyborg. I think it’s an okay look on me. I’ve been trying to find humor in this situation while also honouring how freaked out I feel.”

Fig. 1: “Sick-Girl Selfie” [Image ID: A selfie of Margeaux lying on a bed, posing with a tangle of wires around them and taped to their face. Their right arm is extended behind their head with the elbow bent.]

I was spending the night in a sleep clinic in the hopes of finding out why I had been exhausted for months. That spring, after spending six months dealing with a string of seemingly disconnected illnesses – including a UTI, sinus infection, and kidney infection – I was beyond exhausted. I was sleeping ten to thirteen hours a night, napping throughout the day, and I got winded making dinner. After rounds of blood work came back normal, my doctor suggested I do a sleep study.

So there I was, in the bizarre space of the sleep clinic, feeling like I was in an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space 9. Connected to a million different wires, I walked through the clinic to see identical rooms with the same grey walls, double bed, and IKEA bedspreads, and wondered if anyone else was processing the uncanniness I felt. I would spend the night here and part of the next day. If I needed to use the bathroom during the night, I would have to buzz a nurse to come and disconnect me. And when I had resumed my place in bed, a voice would come on through 136 the intercom telling me to blink, open and close my mouth, and wiggle my toes before telling me to have a good sleep.

The decision to take this photo and post it to Instagram was motivated, in part, by a desire to show the world just how bizarre my experience was. But it was also because I felt anxious and wanted to connect with others. And so I took a selfie. Selfies have been defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or a webcam and uploaded to a social media website.” In their introduction to the special issue on selfies in the International Journal of Communication, Theresa Senft and Nancy Baym develop this definition to highlight the relationality at the heart of the selfie: “a selfie is a photographic object that initiates the transmission of human feeling in the form of a relationship … a gesture that can send (and is often intended to send) different messages to different individuals, communities, and audiences” (1589).

Senft and Baym’s definition runs counter to the cultural anxiety surrounding selfies, in which selfies are labeled as narcissistic objects that represent an unhealthy need for validation – especially amongst teen girls and young women.1 These same detractors are quick to decry selfies as a form of low art, despite the fact that, as various critics have noted, artists have been creating self-portraits for hundreds of years.2 I will not spend too much time responding to these arguments, as others have done so already.3 What I will say is that the claim that selfies are narcissistic or shallow demonstrates a narrow understanding of online culture, as well as a fundamental misreading of narcissism.

In The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism, cultural critic Kristin Dombeck returns to the story of Narcissus in order to highlight how the cultural understanding of narcissism as purely self-interested is, in fact, a misreading of Ovid’s story: “the prophecy was not the Narcissus would love himself, but that he would know himself; the curse was not that he would love himself, but that he would fail ‘in that great love’” (111-2). And so when Narcissus looks at his reflection in the water, he sees someone entirely other, and it is that image that he falls in love with. It is time, then, for us to abandon the claim that selfies are narcissistic.

As I will discuss in greater detail later in this chapter, forums like Instagram – on which the selfie has become an ubiquitous staple – have provided a vital platform for connection, where 137 articulating the “I” vis-à-vis the selfie requires what Erin Wunker calls “a wager of vulnerability” as you watch the likes and comments come in – or not come in (17). Across various Instagram movements, including fat positivity and #HospitalGlam, which I’ll turn my attention to shortly, selfies include a story about how the person is feeling that day, often touching on a topic that the selfie-taker has been struggling with. Thus we can read selfies as a form of visual diary or a form of life writing.4 In this sense, the selfie can be understood as a vulnerable act in which the subject asks, “Who will see this? How many people will like it?” In this chapter, I argue that selfies can create a community of care. For the purposes of this chapter, I will focus on what Khakpour calls the “sick-girl selfie” – a term that I will work to theorize (211). The sick-girl selfie, I contend, works to create a community of care by drawing attention to – and challenging – the long history of pathologizing the mental and physical health of girls and women that was formalized with the work on hysterics in nineteenth-century France. This history is not over. Rather, it is alive and well in the treatment of chronic illness and autoimmune diseases today.

In the first part of this chapter I turn my attention to the rise in chronic illnesses and autoimmune diseases in the twenty-first century and look at the political motivations driving the #HospitalGlam movement. I then place these images in dialogue with the photographs of the hysterics taken at the Salpêtrière in the nineteenth century, demonstrating how today’s sick-girl selfies are haunted by Jean Martin-Charcot’s hysterical patients. In the final section, I provide a more in-depth analysis of the treatment – or lack thereof – of chronic illnesses today by looking at the recent rise in chronic illness memoirs, including Porochista Khakpour’s Sick: A Memoir (2018) and Esmé Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays (2019). I have selected Wang’s and Khakpour’s memoirs for a couple of reasons. The first is that both women are actively posting sick girl selfies on Instagram. The second is that Khakpour and Wang are friends who have declared themselves “sisters in Lyme.” The last reason for selecting these two authors is because of the fact that within the rising genre of illness memoirs, very few authors are women of colour. As I discussed in Chapter 2, there is a long legacy of medicalized racism, and this legacy means that the stakes of being a chronically ill woman in the world are even higher for women of colour.5

Taking my cue from Aimee Morrison, who argues that the selfie is a form of life writing, I’ll look at some of the selfies posted by Khakpour and Wang, reading these images as being in 138 conversation with their written texts. Inspired by Michel Foucault’s argument in The Care of the Self that caring for oneself is also an act of caring for others, I see the selfie as an act of caring for the individual as well as an act of care for the community.6 Given that being sick can lead to feeling isolated, as we are unable to leave our houses and sometimes our beds, this act of making the chronically ill self visible via the sick-girl selfie works to foster connection – with those who are sick and those who are not. Sick-girl selfies point us towards an ethics of care, in which the sick woman is no longer the site of pathology – but, rather, the site of potentiality.

Invisible Illness & #HospitalGlam

The story of the hashtag “HospitalGlam” begins with Karolyn Gehrig (see fig. 2). Gehrig was diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (EDS) in 2003. EDS is a genetic connective-tissue disorder that prevents the regeneration of collagen, leading to frequent joint dislocations, organ rupture, and other issues. It is also an autoimmune disease, and falls under the umbrella of chronic illness. Chronic comes from the Greek word, chronos, meaning “of time”:

Fig. 2. “What is #HospitalGlam?” [Image ID: A screenshot of an Instagram post. In this selfie Karolyn Gehrig is wearing all black and her right arm is at a 90-degree angle and is holding her cane. Her left arm is extended up with her hand in her long blond hair. Behind her is an examination table, reclined up like a chair, and the white tissue covering it is wrinkled, indicating that Gehrig was sitting there before taking this photo] specifically, it means “a lifetime.” This is an illness without a cure. It might not kill Gehrig, but she’ll have it for the rest of her life. Soon after the diagnosis, Gehrig began posting photos of herself in various hospital settings. In doing so, she helped draw attention to the unsettling number of women living with autoimmune diseases. 139

In a talk at Harvard University, author Meghan O’Rourke argues that, “If every age has its representative poorly understood and highly symbolic disease, ours is autoimmunity.” O’Rourke – who was diagnosed with late stage Lyme disease in 2012 – notes that “In a normal immune response, the body creates antibodies and white blood cells to fight off viruses and bacteria.” Autoimmunity, then, is what occurs when the body’s immune system mistakenly attacks the body’s own tissues and is no longer able to recognize the difference between self and non-self. The cells fail to tolerate the very tissues that they are meant to protect.

Autoimmune diseases tend to be invisible, meaning that the symptoms are not as obvious as say a cough when you have a cold, and are much harder to diagnose. Symptoms often include fatigue, brain fog, headaches, or other forms of bodily pain in the muscles or joints. This invisibility makes it all too easy to assume that autoimmune diseases are rare. According to the American Autoimmune Related Diseases Association (AARDA) there are eighty to a hundred different autoimmune disorders. Among some of the more commonly known diseases are Type 1 diabetes, lupus, endometriosis, multiple sclerosis, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, otherwise known as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease. Despite these numbers, Anne Elizabeth Moore, author of Body Horror: Capitalism, Fear, Misogyny, Jokes notes that “The National Institute of Health (NIH) funded autoimmune research at a measly $850 million in 2016, a drop from 2012’s $867 million, since which time diagnoses of individual autoimmune diseases rose between 2.5 percent and 6 percent a year, depending on the condition” (196). If autoimmune diseases are becoming increasingly more common (or, at least, more commonly diagnosed) then why is the funding for research on the decline? Moore offers one possible answer: misogyny. And Moore isn’t the only one to make this claim. In the 1970s manifesto Complaints and Disorders: The Sexual Politics of Sickness, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English proclaim: “the medical system is also strategic to women’s oppression. Medical science has been one of the most powerful sources of sexist ideology in our culture” (31).

This history must be acknowledged, especially given that the majority of people diagnosed with autoimmune diseases are cisgender women.7 While autoimmune diseases impact twenty percent of the population in the United States, according to AARDA seventy-five percent of those diagnosed with autoimmune diseases are women. To translate those percentages into numbers, if around 50 million people live with autoimmune diseases that means that women make up 37.5 140 million of them. In her 2018 publication, Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick, journalist Maya Dusenbery notes how “women are twice as likely to have autoimmune diseases, many of which bring with them persistent pain” (177). Dusenbury also explains that, “More than half of all American women have at lest one chronic health condition, and women are more likely than men to have multiple chronic problems. What’s more, prevalence rates of many of the conditions that disproportionately affect women—from autoimmune disease to Alzheimer’s—are increasing” (20). Chronic illnesses are largely invisible: there are often no visible markers of the disease, and so those who suffer can walk through the world looking “normal.”

The invisibility of chronic illness, coupled with the gender disparity between those impacted by these diseases, has real stakes for women. In a 2015 essay for The Atlantic, “How Doctors Take Women's Pain Less Seriously,” Joe Fassler recounts how his wife Rachel arrived at the emergency room in excruciating pain only to have her pain dismissed by ER doctors and misdiagnosed as kidney stones. Eventually a different doctor came on rotation and realized that Rachel was experiencing ovarian torsion, which, as Fassler explains, “creates the kind of organ- failure pain few people experience and live to tell about.” Fassler goes on to detail how things might have been different if he were the one in pain, not Rachel: “men wait an average of 49 minutes before receiving an analgesic for acute abdominal pain. Women wait an average of 65 minutes for the same thing.”8 To make matters worse, once women receive attention from medical staff, they’ll often face misdiagnosis. Dusenbury notes how “women’s symptoms are brushed off as the result of depression, anxiety, or the all-purpose favourite: stress. Sometimes, they are attributed to women’s normal physiological states and cycles: to menstrual cramps, menopause, or even being a new mom” (4). Rachel’s experience is not an anomaly; it is the norm.9

What makes her case special is that she had her husband there to help advocate for her, and that he would later recount this story in writing for the entire world to read. In other words, not only did Rachel have an advocate, that advocate was a man who believed in her pain and fought with doctors so she could get the treatment she needed. And fourteen hours after she showed up in the emergency room, Rachel was wheeled into surgery. Rachel survived the ordeal, but as her husband notes, “Rachel’s physical scars are healing, and she can go on the long runs she loves, 141 but she’s still grappling with the psychic toll—what she calls ‘the trauma of not being seen.’” It’s important to name that Rachel also had the benefit of white privilege. On September 28, 2020, Joyce Echaquan, a 37-year-old Canadian Indigenous woman, died after being ignored by doctors and nurses at a hospital in Joliette, Quebec. After complaining of stomach pain, Echaquan started to livestream what was happening via Facebook, capturing nurses accusing her of being on drugs and told her that she was “stupid, only good for sex, and that she would be better off dead.”10 A few hours later, Echaquan, a mother of seven, died. I can’t help but think of how, in livestreaming her experience, Echaquan was saying to the staff, “You may refuse to see me, but I won’t let this go unseen.” The stakes to being seen are for so many a matter of life or death.

But being chronically ill is a sort of double-edged sword. On the one hand, being able to pass as healthy has certain benefits, and many would prefer to not disclose their illness out of fear that it could make it difficult, for example, to land that job they want. And yet, on the other hand, looking “healthy” provides doctors and other medical health professionals with a rationale for not taking women’s pain seriously. Wang, whose sick-girl selfies I’ll return to at the end of this chapter, suffers from late-stage Lyme and schizoaffective disorder. In a 2015 essay for The Toast, Wang recounts how she lost her medical insurance after a private investigator followed her around and noted in his report: “Observation indicated that the subject was seen laughing and smiling while conversing with the employee who rang up the subject’s latte. No grimacing or hobbled movement was noted.” What Wang’s account highlights is the way that able-bodied society has certain expectations of the sick body – what she should look like, how she should move – and those expectations can dictate the care that the subject receives.

In Fantasies of Identification: Disability, Gender, Race, Ellen Samuels provides a useful framework for understanding the incredulity that chronically ill women are forced to confront again and again. Building on Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, which explains how the state works to control the bodies of its subjects, Samuels coins a new term: biocertification. For Samuels, biocertification “describes the many forms of government documents that purport to authenticate a person’s social identity through biology” and “materializes the modern belief that only science can reliably determine the truths of identity and generally claims to offer a simple, verifiable, and concrete solution to questions of identity” (122). In other words, if a doctor is unable to certify your symptoms by way of a diagnosis, your symptoms must not be real. This 142 dismissal is justified, according to Samuels, by “the overmastering fantasy of modern disability identification,” which claims that, “disability is a knowable, obvious, and unchanging category” (121). Anything that confounds the doctor’s understanding – usually because it is not visibly marked – or refuses to be static – as is the case with so many chronic illnesses and autoimmune diseases – will not receive biocertification. And without these medical documents, those who are sick will find it difficult, if not impossible to receive the government support they need.11

It is the dismissal and erasure of women’s pain that led Gehrig to invent the #HospitalGlam movement in 2014. Sometimes dressed in a hospital gown and donning bright pink lip gloss, other times wearing a fashionable outfit and striking a pose reminiscent of a high fashion magazine spread, Gehrig started taking photos of herself at doctor’s appointments in order to remind herself that having a chronic illness does not mean that she can no longer be glamorous. But the #HospitalGlam photos have more nuanced potentialities than that. In a post from May 31, 2017, Gehrig defines #HospitalGlam as:

a social movement that uses site specific self portraiture (or selfies) to further self advocacy and boost disabled and chronically ill voices. The term #HospitalGlam was coined as a dark nod at the complexities in representing invisible illness. The project started by appropriating fashion imagery and reinserting it into medical environments using bodies that don’t outwardly present as sick or disabled.

While the selfie might focus on the individual, Gehrig believes that the hashtag can and does promote social bonds. When asked by Alexandra King, “What do you want someone to feel when they post a #hospitalglam image?” Gehrig responds: “I want them to feel the bridge between them and the other people in the project, and [know] they are not alone. I want them to feel connected.”

In order to participate in the hashtag, selfie-takers must familiarize themselves with the criteria for what constitutes a #HospitalGlam photo. You must be in the photo; it must be taken in a clinical environment where you’ll need to advocate for yourself with a medical professional; point of view shots, which Gehrig defines as “needle in arm, or shots of your procedures instead of you” do not count; finally, Gehrig notes that “You don’t have to wear a special outfit, or makeup or anything fancy. Just be yourself and push for the treatment you need. It is enough.” 143

For Gehrig, the Hospital Glam movement is political and she hopes that it will inspire women to advocate for themselves in the face of medical health professionals who wish to dismiss them.

Gehrig’s movement must have struck a chord. A year after starting the hashtag, #HospitalGlam was finding itself in the pages of BuzzFeed, Huffington Post, Bustle, The Guardian, and Refinery29.12 Arabelle Sicardi of BuzzFeed proclaims that Gehrig’s #HospitalGlam “tak[es] shame out of being in treatment one selfie at a time” while Dawn Foster of The Guardian describes the hashtag as “a celebration of our existence against all the odds.” Cultural critics are not the only ones who have taken note of Gehrig’s project.

Scholar and art historian Tamar Tembeck also found herself drawn to Gehrig’s project. In her essay, “Selfies of Ill Health: Online Autopathographic Photography and the Dramaturgy of the Everyday” Tembeck takes Gehrig’s #HospitalGlam photographs as her case study. Tembeck argues that we can read Gehrig’s photographs as a form of autopathography with a “dramaturgical thrust” that conveys “both the centrality of medical experiences in the subjects’ lives and their specific desire to be publicly identified as persons living with illness” (9). Coining the phrase “selfies of ill health,” Tembeck divides these selfies into three categories. The first set of images have the same appearances and purposes as a regular selfie, except that they are taken in a medical environment or capture a signifier of ill health (such as a hospital gown). Tembeck notes that, “While such self-images may indeed be tied to medical experiences, these experiences hardly appear to direct or even inform the image’s content” (2). The second category contains images meant to circulate on online communities “to promote or offer support for certain behaviours that are generally deemed pathological” such as “ images shared on Tumblr in the “pro-ana” and “pro-mia” movements (supporting anorexia or bulimia), for instance, or self- injury photographs circulating on Flickr.” Finally, the third category of selfies of ill health work to “acknowledge the impact of illness or treatments on the subject,” are often educational in nature, and can help viewers diagnose themselves, on the one hand, or may serve as cautionary tales on the other (2). It is this final category that Tembeck is the most interested in – and it is here that she locates Gehrig’s work.

I appreciate Tembeck’s care in cataloguing these varying forms of “selfies of ill health,” but I want to propose a different term, one that I believe captures the ways in which women’s pain and 144 ill health is pathologized and dismissed: sick-girl selfies. As I discussed in the introduction, my preference for “sick” instead of “ill” is manifold.13 Ill feels a little too palatable, a little too polite. It presents itself as a neutral term, as a fact. Sick, on the other hand, holds more negative connotations. To be sick is to be deviant, hideous, unwanted, a threat. There is nothing polite or palatable about sickness. As Ehrenreich and English argue: if “illness” marks “resistance,” then “sickness” is an “overt rebellion” (160). You might have gotten ill because someone else did not wash their hands; if you’ve gotten sick it’s because you did not wash your hands. If you are ill, we’ll cure you. If you’re sick, we’ll lock you up and throw away the key. By choosing the word “sick,” I wish to draw attention to the ways that being sick is culturally – as well as physiologically – defined.

Returning to Tembeck’s analysis, it is worth noting that, unlike the cultural critics that celebrated the #HospitalGlam movement, Tembeck shifts her attention away from the reparative possibilities of Gehrig’s hashtag. She argues that such a focus is too large for the scope of her paper and chooses instead to look at what these selfies make possible for the individual (6). Tembeck claims that “Gehrig’s poses before the camera also serve her immediate personal needs, allowing her to be more attentive to her body and, in so doing, to take charge of the situation at hand in the doctor’s office or waiting room” (7). While I believe that Gehrig’s own health should be of vital consideration, I’m less interested in “investigating longitudinal performances of the self” captured by selfies (3) and much more interested in how the sick-girl selfie might, indeed, hold some form of reparative potential that is grounded in community care.

This community comes, in part, from acknowledging a lineage: one that begins with Jean-Martin Charcot’s photographs of hysterics. It is these women of the Salpêtrière that haunt Gehrig’s photographs. Given Tembeck’s interest in dramaturgy, I was surprised that Charcot’s dramaturgical stagings of his hysterics – both in photographs but also upon the theatre stage – did not inform her reading. In Gehrig’s photo from April 7, 2016 (see fig. 3), the left leg is extended, reminiscent of the leg contractures captured in the photographs of the Salpêtrière (see fig. 4). 145

Figure 3: “I continue to practice #HospitalGlam.” [Image ID: A screenshot of an Instagram post by Karolyn Gehrig. In the photo, Gehrig sits on top of a hospital bed, reclined up like a chair. She’s wearing a multi-colored, long-sleeved dress with the face of Mona Lisa on the front, and black leggings. She’s posing, with her left leg extended out, right arm gripping the side of the back of the chair, head tilted back, and left arm extended up.]

Fig. 4: “Hystéro-Épilepsie: Contracture” [Image ID: a vintage photograph. In the centre a femme figure sits on a chair, wearing a white dress. Her right leg is extended straight out, with toes pointed, and she looks directly at the camera. Underneath the photo the text reads: Planche XXIX. “Hystéro-Épilepsie: Contracture”] 146

The slippage between model and patient, patient and model becomes all too clear when a hand reaching up for the face turns from an act transpiring during a hallucination (see fig. 6) to a conscious pose (see fig. 5).

Fig. 5: “#HospitalGlam: Healthcare is a luxury good” [Image ID: A screenshot of an Instagram post by Gehrig. She’s sitting in a hospital changing room, on a blue bench, wearing a blue dressing gown. Her purse is to her right and her right hand is posed cupping her chin, with her head titled back and eyes looking off to the left. Her right hand is extended down and is gripping her left calf.]

Figure 6: “Attitudes Passionelles: Hallucinations de L’Ouie” [Image ID: a vintage photograph of a hysterical patient. She’s sitting on a bed, with white sheets around her body. Her right hand is reaching upwards, with her pointer finger touching her face, which is looking off to the right. Underneath the photograph is a caption that reads Planchet XXIV. Attitudes Passionelles: Halluncinations de L’Ouie”] 147

The connection I wish to make is not just aesthetic in nature. Today’s woman in pain finds herself being treated like the hysterics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: dismissed as irrational, treated as pathological. And it is this history that I’ll now begin to trace.

Sick Girls, Hysterical Women

Located in Paris, the Salpêtrière was a gun factory that was transformed into a hospice for poor women under the order of Louis XIV in 1656. By 1690, three thousand women – made up of prostitutes, the mentally ill, and other deviant women – occupied the Salpêtrière and became, to borrow the words of Georges Didi-Huberman, “the city of incurable women” (13). Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the hospital underwent a reform led by Phillipe Pinel, the chief physician at the Salpêtrière as of 1794. It would take another seventy years before Jean-Martin Charcot, a neurologist and professor of anatomical pathology, began his work at the Salpêtrière in 1862. For Charcot, the Salpêtrière was “a kind of living pathological museum,”14 and it was there that he worked to understand the root cause of what became known as hysteria.

The word “hysteria” existed long before Charcot. Its first usage can be found in Hippocrates’s thirty-fifth aphorism. But as Didi-Huberman notes in Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière, it was Charcot who transformed hysteria into a pathology (xi). For Charcot and others who followed him, including Sigmund Freud, hysteria came to describe a series of seemingly disconnected symptoms that disproportionately impacted women. According to Elaine Showalter, Charcot believed that “hysteria was an inherited disease of the nervous system that could be triggered by emotional or physical trauma in vulnerable men or women” (33). Didi-Huberman explains that Charcot’s goal was to codify the expressions of the hysterical women into a “recordable state of signification” (51). In other words, Charcot wished to create taxonomy of the madwoman, as if to say: “Here’s what this sickness looks like.” And that’s exactly what he did.

In order to do so, Charcot divided hysteria into three categories: hysteria proper, hysteria minor, and hysterioepilepsy. In Performing Neurology: The Dramaturgy of Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot, Jonathan W. Marshall describes how hysteria proper “was a functional disorder of an otherwise healthy neuromotor system” and could exist “independently of, or as a complication of, actual structural neuromotor illness” (40). With hysteria minor, the subject might experience brief 148 moments of paralysis, or some other small-scale symptoms, but nothing that would dramatically impact her functional capacities. It was the final category, hysterioepilepsy, that Charcot was the most interested in. According to Marshall, Charcot defined hysterioepilepsy as a “fully-evolved functional illness … which mimicked many of the symptoms of other conditions with somatic, structural causes” (40). Many of the hysterics Charcot treated would suffer from seizures, thus mimicking the symptoms of epilepsy, but without any other symptoms that could support an epilepsy diagnosis.

To prove that such taxonomy could exist, Charcot turned to photography and weekly public lectures. Every week Charcot would give an informal lecture on Tuesday morning and a more formal prepared lecture on the Friday afternoon. Those in the audience were varied and included students and physicians as well as artists, actors, socialites, and politicians. The lectures were so famous that the hospital became a tourist destination. As Marshall notes: “the Salpêtrière itself featured prominently in the newspaper articles and even tourist guidebooks” of the time (32). While the audience was diverse, the lectures were not open to the public and those who wished to attend needed a formal invitation.

Why were so many interested in the weekly lectures of a neurologist? It is said that Charcot was not an especially mesmerizing lecturer. The reason that his lectures drew such widespread attention was a rather unique performative element: Charcot would bring his patients up on stage and have them act out their symptoms. It is worth noting that the Salpêtrière did not have a theatre prior to Charcot. At his behest, the theatre was built in 1880. Charcot was the key architect of its design and, as Marshall argues, the dramaturge when upon the stage. Marshall describes how Charcot thus “created a reiterative theatre in which the physical repetition of movements, captured and analyzed through photography and drawing, was invoked in the lecture theatre so as to clarify, stabilize, and order that which lay at the margins of orderly conduct – namely, the living pathological body” (31). There was performance upon the stage, as well as in the photographs that made the Salpêtrière famous.

For the purposes of this chapter, I want to shift my focus to the photographs in the Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière, as it is within the photographs that we see the striking similarities to the sickness selfies, with the haunting presence of Charcot’s hysterics. Taken 149 between 1875-1880 by intern and photographer P. Régnard, the photographs document approximately twenty patients, notably all women, the most famous of which is Louise Augustine Gleizes (fig. 4 & 5).15 Alongside these photographs are descriptions of each patient’s pathology, written by Charcot and his associates, including the Iconographie’s author Désiré Magloire Bourneville and Charcot’s assistance Paul Richer. In the first volume of the Iconographie, Bourneville explains how the Iconographie came into being out of the regret that, due to the limitations of medical imaging at the time, there was no way to “perpetuate through drawing the memory of cases that we have had the chance to observe.” Their regret, he notes, “becomes all the more acute” for Bourneville, Richer, and Charcot,” as they believed that there was much to gain from a visual representation of what they saw taking place in their sessions with the hysterical patients (iii). And so they turned to photography to serve as record, and therefore evidence of pathology.

Charcot’s weekly lectures and photographs resulted in much fame for the doctor. It is reported that during his election into the Institut de France, Professor Charles Bouchard turned to Charcot and said, “The study of hysteria could have brought you triumphant to Rome or dragged you into the mud. You were courageous and fortune has rewarded your audacity.”16 Despite the fame that his work with hysterical women brought him, Charcot himself was not particularly interested in his patients. As Showalter notes, “he cared about them only as cases” – limiting his interactions to the hospital examining room, while his students spent the majority of the time meeting with these women, and would report their findings to Charcot (36).

But Charcot would not have become famous without his most photographed subject: Augustine. Augustine was hospitalized on October 21, 1875, when she was fifteen, and diagnosed with hysterioepilepsy. In the Iconographie Augustine is described as though she is as a scientific specimen:

Tall, well-developed (neck a bit thick, ample breasts, underarms and pubis covered with hair), with a determined tone and bearing, temperamental, noisy. No longer behaving in the least like a child, she looks almost like a full-grown woman, and yet she has never menstruated. She was admitted for paralysis of sensation in the right arm and attacks of severe hysteria, preceded by pains in the lower right abdomen. (IPS II 125) 150

Not a girl (“no longer behaving in the least like a child”) and not quite a woman (“she looks almost like a full-grown woman), Bourneville is confounded by Augustine’s adolescent state. As he catalogues her symptoms, he notes the abdominal pain can cause Augustine to pass out completely.

Augustine’s fits made her one of the Salpêtrière’s ideal subjects for study. She was a “living work of art,” “a masterpiece” because of how her symptoms manifested (Didi-Huberman 122). It is noted in the Iconographie that Augustine’s “poses or passionate attitudes have the most regularity” (II 736) and Didi-Huberman proclaims Augustine as “one of the great stars” (117). Their praise of Augustine comes from the fact that her attacks were punctuated by periods of repose, enabling the photographer the time they needed to capture her gestures on camera. Didi- Huberman describes Augustine’s temporal progression as “the sort of dramaturgical cutting of her symptoms into acts, scenes, and tableaux” (117). I can’t help but think of how one of the tenants of being a successful fashion model is that you allow the photographer just enough time to capture your pose before moving onto the next movement. Today, Augustine would have earned the title of supermodel.

In Etudes cliniques sur la grand hystérie ou hystéro-épilspsie (1881-1885), Paul Richer explains that her poses and passions “correspond mainly to two events of her existence. She was a victim of the first when she was ten years old. It was terrible for her and marked her entry into life. The second event, on the contrary, was the source of much pleasure, which she did not try to conceal” (736). In the second volume of the Iconographie, Bourneville fills in the blanks left by Richer. In a section marked “further information,” Bourneville describes the first event. Around the age of ten, Augustine lived in a religious boarding school in La Ferté-Sous-Jouarre. She was free to roam about as she pleased, and so she would go out for walks in the country, where it is said that she’d let men embrace her in exchange for candy. While out, she’d often visit the wife of a painter named Jules. Jules was prone to getting drunk and physically assaulting his wife and Augustine was often a witness to these attacks. One day, it is reported that Jules tried to kiss Augustine and was violent with her. And this was, obviously, quite a traumatizing event (IPS II 126). 151

The second traumatic event: her mother’s lover, also Augustine’s employer, rapes her at age thirteen. Bourneville explains how, “C…, after making her all sorts of dazzling promises and giving her pretty dresses, etc., seeing that she would not give in, threatened her with a razor. Taking advantage of her fright, he forced her to drink some liqueur, undressed her, threw her on the bed and consummated relations” (IPS II 126). The following day Augustine falls ill, vomiting and experiencing stomach pains, which a physician attributes to start of menstruation without even performing an examination of Augustine (IPS II 126-7). A few days later, Augustine falls into a hysterical fit upon seeing “the green eyes of a cat looking at her; when she cried out, her mother arrived to find her utterly terrified and bleeding from her nose. Then the attacks broke out” (IPS II 127). Augustine’s parents placed her as a servant at an old lady’s house. What transpired between this event and Augustine’s admittance into the Salpêtrière is unknown, but she would stay there for five months.

During this time, Bourneville would record numerous outbursts or “fits” as they were called. In a rather disturbing transcription of Augustine’s speech during one of her hysterical attacks she asks: “What do you know about medicine?” before proclaiming, “I don’t want to feel you near me!… I won’t uncross my legs!… Oh! You really did hurt me… no, you won’t manage!… Help! … Leave me alone… It’s impossible… You don’t want to anymore? Again! … Get rid of that snake you have in your pants!… You wanted me to sin before you, but you had already sinned…” (IPS II 146-164).17 There’s some slippage between the “you” of Augustine’s speech. Without any context, it at first it appears that she could be speaking to Bourneville himself. But then one starts to get the sense that the “you” has changed. “Get rid of that snake in your pants!” she cries out, thus making one wonder if Augustine is now back in the past and is speaking to the man who raped her. Asti Hustvedt fills in the gaps, explaining that Augustine’s rapist, Mr. C., “had actually sat in on Charcot’s classes in the hope of catching a glimpse of the girl he had assaulted. On two separate occasions he watched her from the audience […] Several days later, when she was not hallucinating, Augustine told Bourneville that the second time he came, she had spoken to him and threated to denounce him if he ever returned” (192).

Bourneville, tasked with discerning whether this story was a case of hysterical fabulation, decides to believe Augustine because of the memory’s coherency. In their review of the film Augustine, released in 2012, Walusinski et al discuss how Bourneville recognized that 152

Augustine’s symptoms were tied to her traumatic past, and that he “understood perfectly that childhood trauma explains the ‘conversion’ that is hysteria” (227). And yet, if he believes in Augustine’s account, why does it end up in “further information,” thus turning one of Augustine’s traumas into a parenthetical aside? As I read the translation of this scene in Didi- Huberman’s text, I also can’t help but wonder: why it has taken him over sixty pages to get here only to refer to it as “a detour”? (158). Didi-Huberman evokes a different meaning of “detour”: it is not just to change direction, but also to turn away. The doctors working with Augustine were not the only ones to take a detour, as it were, from this vital information. Sigmund Freud will also follow suit.

In 1905, Freud publishes one of his most famous case studies. In 1900, Freud was called upon to visit an eighteen-year old girl, Ida Bauer, or “Dora” as Freud will call her. Dora has been exhibiting a slew of undesirable feelings: she is depressed, irritable, and has expressed suicidal thoughts; she is anti-social and standoffish to her parents (I can’t help but think: well, she is a teenager). But her family is even more perturbed by the emergence of a cough and a loss of voice. As it turns out, Dora has recently accused her father’s friend, Herr K., of making sexual advances towards her. Unsurprisingly, Herr K. denies it and Dora’s father believes his friend, refusing to cast him aside and continuing to invite Herr K. and his wife to their summer home. It is Dora’s father who calls in Freud. Freud’s diagnosis: hysteria.

Unlike Charcot, Freud believed that hysteria is the psychosomatic response to trauma: the body manifests its trauma in a cough, in a loss of voice. As Marshall notes in Performing Neurology, instead of focusing on neurological development, Freud “broke free from the neurologist to argue that the chief concern of physicians should be on the patients’ psychological development” (7). In other words, for Charcot the body came before the mind, whereas for Freud the mind came before the body. While Charcot believed that illness was the cause of neurosensory function, Freud claimed that the root cause was psychological or sexual. Freud will go on to posit the “seduction theory,” which is grounded in the belief that hysteria is caused by early experiences of sexual abuse – most often at the hands of the girl’s father.

With this approach in mind, Freud argued that that Dora’s loss of voice was connected to the trauma of Herr K.’s sexual advances. But then he proposes that Dora believes that her father is 153 having an affair with Herr K.’s wife and that her father has offered his daughter to Herr K. as some sort of trade. Freud will make many other hypotheses before Dora decides to terminate her sessions with the psychoanalyst. Her act of defiance thrills me because it thwarts the psychoanalyst’s attempts to come to a definite conclusion. She refuses to have him dismiss her trauma. But Freud comes to a conclusion anyway: it might not always be the case that the hysteric experienced sexual trauma, but that she imagined or even fantasized it into existence. Freud’s changing hypothesis marks his move away from seduction theory into his theory of Oedipal desire, in which real occurrences of sexual abuse are replaced by fantasies of sexual abuse.18 Poor Dora, like so many of her time, was the victim of gaslighting. And it is this act of gaslighting that is alive and well in the treatment of women with chronic illnesses today.

In an attempt to right the wrongs of Freud’s treatment of Dora, I’d like to propose that instead of labeling Dora’s bodily response to this trauma as pathology, we could return to the original meaning of disease. What if we could see how, through the loss of her voice, her body was manifesting the dis-ease of being a woman living under the patriarchy? Obsolete meaning of “disease”: an absence of ease; to feel uneasiness or discomfort; a second obsolete meaning: inconvenience, annoyance. Another obsolete meaning that cannot be ignored in this context is “molestation.” To do disease to, to molest.

Tied to this history of rape culture, and one of its sustaining forces, is the pathologization of women’s feelings. A woman feels afraid when a man walks behind her at night: that’s irrational. A woman feels angry when being catcalled: she’s a bitch. A woman refuses to smile when commanded by a stranger: there must be something wrong with her. Let’s rewrite the examples of pathologization: A woman feels disease (discomfort) when a man walks behind her at night; a woman feels disease (molested) when being catcalled; a woman feels disease (annoyance) when being told to smile. How and why did these feelings of dis-ease become a disease?

If we return to Freud’s analysis of Dora, we discover that Freud had it right at the beginning: hysteria is the body’s way of responding to a trauma that cannot be spoken. Freud notes in Studies in Hysteria how his hysterics were not able to respond to the trauma, either because there is an irreplaceable loss or “because social circumstances made a reaction impossible” (13). But 154

Freud couldn’t have that be his conclusion. For if every case of hysteria was a case of rape or sexual assault, well we’d be living in rape culture.

Despite the fact that the DSMV eliminated hysteria as an official diagnosis in the 1980s (instead replacing it with “conversion disorder”) we can still find the specter of hysteria in the understanding (or, one could argue, misunderstanding) and treatment of chronic illness.19 In her poetry collection Tender Points, Amy Berkowitz tells the reader how, “As I read more about the history of invisible illness, I’m surprised and amused to diagnose myself with hysteria” (37). But of course, hysteria isn’t her official diagnosis. Berkowitz has fibromyalgia: a chronic pain condition caused by the constant tightening of the body’s connective tissues. Her tongue-and- cheek comment serves two purposes. The first is to draw attention to the ways that women are still treated as hysterical, especially when they arrive at the doctor complaining that they’re in pain. It is a relief when Berkowitz is given a diagnosis because it gives her illness legitimacy. It isn’t “all in her head.” The second purpose of Berkowitz’s claim to hysteria is to validate the experiences of hysterics past. Despite her diagnosis, Berkowitz proclaims: “I know the true name of this disease—My Body Is Haunted by a Certain Trauma—so I don’t care what other name it has, so long as it has one. Something to point to. Something to call it” (29). Reading her words, I am reminded of Freud’s famous proclamation in Studies in Hysteria that “hysterics suffer for the most part from reminiscences” (11).20 Hysterics, in other words, are haunted by a certain trauma.

The sick-girl selfie captures this trauma. That’s true whether that trauma existed prior to illness, or was created because the trial of achieving a diagnosis is a traumatic one. As Khakpour notes in Sick: “the experience of going for years undiagnosed and then misdiagnosed as many like myself do can cause considerable trauma, to put it mildly” (166).21 In what follows, I will look first at the sickness memoirs of Khakpour and Wang, and then to their sick-girl selfies. I argue that the sick-girl selfie works to undo some of the trauma the sick woman experiences by enabling her to connect with others who’re sick. Via Instagram, the sick woman can understand her sick body not as a pathology that separates her from others, but as holding the potentiality to enact an ethics of care. 155

Sick Women, Blood Sisters

“The one thing I do know: I have been sick my whole life. I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t in some sort of physical pain or mental pain, but usually both,” (27) and so begins the first chapter of Porochista Khakpour’s Sick: A Memoir. In this work of autopathography – a sub- genre of autobiography that pivots on an experience of illness (physical, mental, or oftentimes both) – Khakpour traces her experience with chronic, late-stage Lyme disease by taking the reader on a trip through various places she’s lived, including Iran, Los Angeles, New York, Pennsylvania, and Santa Fe. Jane Ratcliffe of Tin House describes Sick as “a travelogue of sorts” which depicts Khakpour’s “traumas and redemptions.” In The New Yorker, Lidija Haas aptly notes how the non-chronological geographical movements that structure Sick mirrors the spiral shape “not unlike that of the offending bacterium.” Khakpour’s trials and tribulations include sexual assault, institutionalization, navigating her relationship with her incredulous parents, various breakups, and countless dismissals by doctors and other medical health professionals.

One cannot talk about Sick without mentioning the critical attention that it received prior to and following its publication. Sick was one of the most widely anticipated books of 2018, making its way onto Time Magazine’s “Best Memoirs of 2018” list and Oprah.com’s “Top Books of Summer” – to name just a few.22 But despite the book’s immense success, Khakpour has had to rely on GoFundMe’s to help combat the devastating costs of her treatment – her Lyme relapsed shortly before the book’s release – and to help her find a new home, as her New York City apartment became uninhabitable after it was filled with lead and asbestos dust from neighboring demolitions. Wang has been one of Khakpour’s biggest supporters, posting about the GoFundMe on her own Instagram and encouraging her followers to purchase Sick.

Wang’s memoir in essays, The Collected Schizophrenias, was the winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize in 2016. While Wang also has a diagnosis of chronic Lyme, her memoir focuses on her mental health diagnoses: most notably, her diagnosis with schizoaffective disorder. Much in the same way that Khakpour’s diagnosis was a long journey of misdiagnoses, Wang recounts how she was first diagnosed as bipolar the summer before she left to attend Yale University in 2001. It would take another twelve years before doctors re-diagnosed her with schizoaffective disorder: one of the schizophrenias defined by the presence of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. In the time between, Wang was involuntarily hospitalized three times, first in 2002 and 156 then again 2003 and 2011. Two years later she entered her doctor’s office with the first signs of what would later be diagnosed as chronic Lyme in 2015.

In form as well as content, the two books are quite similar. Both are organized into a collection of essays that trace the authors’ quests to find out why they are so ill. But Wang’s essays are populated by references and citations: to medical studies, films, newspaper articles, and other items from the archives of mental hospitals. Khakpour’s, on the other hand, is citationless. But it wasn’t always this way. In her interview with Tin House, Khakpour tells her interlocutor how her book once contained references that she decided to remove: “I wanted to be able to tell my story directly to someone without couching it in theory, history, the sociological… All I am worth is my truth and hopefully that can inspire others to tell their truths too. That to me is a lot.” Khakpour goes on to compare the style of her writing in Sick to her writing on social media: “And that to me is what my social media presence is about—I can’t footnote/endnote my experience to make it more acceptable. It’s maybe not even art what I did with this book, just as I don’t think of my social media as ‘art.’ Oh well—is that bad? Maybe not everything has to be capital-A art.”

Khakpour’s Sick is about a search for an origin story. The memoir is not only concerned with the what (“what is the cause of this sickness”) but also the when (“when did this begin?”). In the opening pages of the memoir Khakpour confines: “I’ve looked for answer from my first few years on this earth, early PTSD upon PTSD, marked by revolution and then war and then refugee years, a person without a home. Could that have caused it? Was displacement of the body literally causing a feeling of displacement in the body?” (5-6). Recalling the etymology of “disease,” perhaps there’s another way to ask this question: is the disease in the body caused by the dis-ease of being an immigrant woman of colour in a racist, patriarchal world?

While Khakpour never explicitly answers this question, we can turn to the work of Sami Schalk to provide one possible answer. In Bodyminds Reimagined: (dis)Ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction, Schalk employs the term “bodymind” to address the ways in which we can no longer maintain the complete separation of the body and the mind. Drawing on Margaret Price’s coinage of the term in her essay “The Bodymind Problem and the Possibilities of Pain,” Schalk explains how “the term bodymind insists on the inextricability of mind and body 157 and highlights how processes within our being impact one another in such a way that the notion of a physical versus mental process is difficult, if not impossible to clearly discern in most cases” (5).23 Schalk goes on to explain how she finds this term “particularly useful in discussing the toll racism takes on people of colour. As more research reveals the ways experiences and histories of oppression impact us mentally, physically, and even on a cellular level, the term bodymind can help highlight the relationship of nonphysical experiences of oppression—psychic stress—and overall well-being” (5-6).24

Alyson Patsavas has proposed her own neologism for analyzing the ways that cultural perceptions of pain as always already leading to a life of tragedy “prevent us from examining the structural conditions that make experiences of chronic pain tragic” (204). Patsavas proposes a “cripistemology of pain” which she defines as “a process of knowledge production that situates pain within discursive systems of power and privilege” (205). In other words, we must look at the structural conditions that can lead to psychic and physical pain, as well as the ways in which these structures position the lives of those living with chronic pain as, quite simply, not worth living.

Khakpour’s Sick illuminates the ways in which the trauma of ongoing structural oppression cannot be separated from Khakpour’s illness. Khakpour recounts how her Lyme relapses

almost always coincide with global turmoil … like the Paris attacks or the election of Donald Trump and its endless horrific aftermath of mainstream bigotry. When the Muslim ban become a constant on the news in 2017, when I found my home country rather unsurprisingly on the list of six countries that had been designated problems according to this administration, I immediately had an acute plunge in health. (167)

This acknowledgment causes Khakpour to wonder: “is this just psychological? Was it just PTSD all along? Were some of those early doctors right, the ones who just thought I was crazy?” (167). Khakpour’s questions reflect a central bind to being a woman with physical and mental health diagnoses: if you declare that the sickness in the body is caused by trauma, you run the risk of validating every doctor’s proclamation that “it’s all in your head.” On the other hand, denying such a link between the body and the mind works to uphold the claims of incredulous doctors 158 who do not wish to give credence to the idea that what happens in the mind can have a physiological impact on our bodies.

While many doctors are now open to the possibility that post-traumatic stress disorder can lead to chronic health conditions and autoimmune diseases, the skepticism outweighs these opinions.25 And yet, despite this skepticism, Khakpour tells the reader how, “there’s something I’ve held on to, that I’ve heard from more than one doctor: the link between chronic illness and PTSD … The disability or illness itself could cause the PTSD, and the experience of going for years undiagnosed and then misdiagnosed as many like myself do can cause considerable trauma, to put it mildly” (165-6). Khakpour does not wish to untether the two despite the risks. In fact, she goes on to argue that a mental health diagnosis can facilitate a chronic health diagnosis: “Women simply aren’t allowed to be physically sick until they are mentally sick, too, and then it is by some miracle or accident that the two can be separated for proper diagnosis. In the end, every Lyme patient has some psychiatric diagnosis, too, if anything because of the hell it takes getting to a diagnosis” (166). The legacy of hysteria, then, can hinder or help the chronically ill woman.

Khakpour never directly references the hysteric, but her ghost can be found throughout Khakpour’s recollections of her early doctor’s visits, and, later, in her voluntary hospitalization. “My entire childhood I was sick with one thing or another, always feeling broken in my body” (34), Khakpour writes before going on to describe a fainting episode when she was thirteen. Khakpour comes out of a hot shower and recounts how

in the fog of the bathroom, as I dried off, I felt strange. I felt both lighter and heavier, like I was being pulled up and down at the same time. My eyesight seemed altered— visuals seemed both brighter and darker, strange shadows jumping in and out, all electric in their tone, nearly metallic in shade. I felt like the life force was being vacuumed out of me, from every opening in my body. (34-5)

After going to find her mother to report, “I think I’m fading,” Khakpour describes waking up in her parents’ bedroom. She’d fainted (35). Khakpour finds that her parents are much more upset about the ordeal than she was. In fact, the act of passing out makes her feel “more peaceful than I had in ages” (35). Fainting, it turns out, enables Khakpour to feel “special … as if I was a 159 character from another world” (35) and recalls Susan Sontag’s claim in Illness as Metaphor that people “were made singular, made more interesting, by their illnesses” (31). Khakpour’s response to this event might make the reader laugh at the preciousness of children, especially the young girls who idealize the seemingly always-already-fainting princesses found in fairy tales. While post-faint Khakpour feels at peace, it’s important to remember the ways that she felt prior to the incident. Feeling both “lighter and heavier,” Khakpour’s body is “being pulled up and down at the same time.” What she sees feels “both brighter and darker” and there are “strange shadows jumping in and out.” The strange shadows, I argue, ask us to look for the morbid history of the female invalid who felt, much like Khakpour, like “the life force was being vacuumed out of [her], from every opening in [her] body.”

In Complaints and Disorder, Ehrenreich and English discuss how, for the woman of the middle and upper classes, being sick was fashionable (51). In their discussion of tuberculosis, Ehrenreich and English describe how the disease became inextricably linked with femininity:

The association of TB with innate feminine weakness was strengthened by the fact that TB is accompanied by an erratic emotional pattern … The behavior characteristic for the disease fit expectations about woman’s personality and the look of disease suited— and perhaps helped to create—the prevailing standards of female beauty. The female consumptive did not lose her feminine identity, she embodied it … Not only were women seen as sickly—sickness was seen as feminine. (56-7)

The sick – and often fainting – woman became idealized for her helplessness, her passivity. For if she could not get up from the couch, how could she possibly cause a stir? As Ehrenreich and English note: “The entire mystique of female sickness—the house calls, the tonics and medicines, the health spas—served, above all, to keep a great many women busy at the task of doing nothing” (81). The cult of female invalidism, according to Ehrenreich and English, ensured that the sick woman was dependent on her husband and her doctor for her survival (82). Ehrenreich and English will go on to argue that “with hysteria, the cult of female invalidism was carried to its logical conclusion” as women began to accept their “inherent sickness” (90). In fact, it was their sickness that enabled them to escape the pressures of bearing children. 160

The connection between fainting women and hysterics is driven home when Khakpour confesses: “It felt like an event to have a condition, especially since I was still months away from getting my period, the affliction that it seemed everyone I knew got to complain about” (35). Unfortunately for Khakpour, the doctor her parents drag her to bursts her fantasy of specialness, telling her that fainting “was normal for my age, which disappointed me” (35). In a quick turn of events, however, “he brought up the possibility of me carrying smelling salts—which I’d only known from old Victorian epics and period cinema that I had at that point become obsessed with—and I was overjoyed” (35). Eventually Khakpour gets her hands on some smelling salts, but never ends up using them. This would be the only time in her life she’d pass out, she explains, as she’d learn to put her head between her legs when feeling faint, and the feeling would pass.

But this experience with the doctor doesn’t fully thwart Khakpour’s desire to be special. Khakpour explains how her ability to exist in this liminal space between fainting and not offers her a special power: “I liked that there was danger involved with me, that I was someone people could lose, that I could flirt with some other realm … I felt like a crystal ballerina, a porcelain swan, but most of all like a ghost” (36). In this list of beautiful and fragile things, the last metaphor feels jarring, because it is difficult to imagine someone who idealizes a ghost. But in recalling the figure of the ghost – the liminal figure par excellence – Khakpour reminds the reader of the ambivalence of her experience, of things being both “brighter and darker” and full of “strange shadows jumping in and out.”

The specter of the hysteric returns again when Khakpour is hospitalized in 2012. “I looked at Dr. Kalder and told him I did not want to be in a psych ward—when it came down to it, I felt in my body that it was not the right place ultimately—even though a part of me had always dreamed of its unknown underworld” (178). It is easy to get caught on Khakpour’s confession that the world of the psychiatric hospital holds some sort of appeal. And yet, given the ways that the sick woman has been idealized and fetishized, it makes sense that Khakpour would find something alluring about this space. After relations with her family begin to fracture, Khakpour notes that “a part of me began fantasizing about living in a psychiatric ward,” for it would provide Khakpour with “a place where I could get help, where people could tend to me, where no one would be too shocked at what was happening” (177). When the possibility of turning such a 161 fantasy into reality is made, Khakpour is in the Huntington Hospital emergency room, her fourth visit in the span of a month. Dr. Kalder, she recalls, “recognized me immediately, with a look of dread” (178). Despite her wish to be admitted into detox for the dependency she’d developed on benzodiazepine (prescribed by a different doctor), a social worker looks at Khakpour and proclaims: “No detox needed. Psychiatric is more appropriate for you” (179).

If one were to read this dialogue outside of the context of Khakpour’s present-day America, it might be all too easy to locate this conversation closer to the time and place of the Salpêtrière. That this is the only option placed in front of Khakpour if she wishes to be well speaks to the fact we haven’t come as far as we might wish to think. In her review of Sick, “Memoirs of Disease and Disbelief,” Lidija Haas writes: “It’s tempting to think of this reflexive, paternalistic skepticism directed at female patients as a remnant of a bygone era. And yet there’s a class of illnesses—multi-symptomatic, chronic, hard to diagnose—that remain associated with suffering women and disbelieving experts.” When Khakpour calls her mother to tell her that she’s decided to admit herself, her mother cries out, “‘You think you’re crazy?’” to which Khakpour responds: “‘I think there is something very wrong with me … I think there is something wrong in my body. But they think it’s the mind. So let them do it their way. Let’s see’” (180). Those suffering from chronic illnesses have become this era’s hysterics, who “aren’t allowed to be physically sick until they are mentally sick, too” (166). Khakpour never makes it to the psych ward, instead spending three days in a holding area until she finds out that she won’t be admitted after all. In the end, she is dismissed.

Eventually, Khakpour will get a diagnosis: chronic, late-stage Lyme disease. Khakpour describes her own disbelief upon being told that there was a name for what had been plaguing her for so many years: “For a moment, I could not say a word. It felt like something that had been ticking inside for ages had stopped. I felt the absence of a certain tension, such a release that it felt nearly violent” (209). But diagnosis does not mean cure. If Lyme disease is not caught in its early stages, it becomes chronic. Until more doctors accept chronic Lyme as a real disorder, and more funding is secured for research, those like Khakpour will be forced to seek treatment outside of western medicine’s prescriptions, which comes with the risk, as Wang notes, of being seen as “indulging in what others call quackery” (TCS 176). 162

While Sick ends with Khakpour alone in the hospital, wondering who to call to be by her side, Khakpour briefly references a woman who will later become her best friend and “sister in Lyme,” someone who will go down the road of quackery with her. Khakpour describes how:

on Christmas Eve, which I spent alone, because absolutely everyone is gone, I agreed to speak to a woman who has been trying me for month, a very sick woman in San Francisco who is convinced she has Lyme, who is suicidal and desperate for guidance, a fellow writer. I talk to her and tried to fill her with all the hope I had now lost … the hope that was essential, and it reminded me of me a bit. (248)

Khakpour will also find herself in the pages of Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias, where these two sick women will offer what little hope they have available to one another.

After receiving the diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder in 2013, Wang wonders where it all began: at what point was she destined to be sick? One possibility she considers comes before she even entered the world:

My head lodged behind a bone in my mother’s pelvis, which hints of an intergenerational transmission of trauma; stress causes the flooding of cortisol and other chemicals into the brain, and my newly immigrated, newly married young mother had her own psychiatric issues to contend with. Who knows what happens to the malleable and muddy assortment of fetal cells because of such strain? (17)

Using her own training as a scientist to explain how stress can cause shifts within the body, Wang offers the hypothesis that maybe her mother’s trauma got passed down to her, was transmitted from the maternal body to the “malleable and muddy assortment of fetal cells” that will later be called Esmé. With this postulation, Wang rejects what she calls “the story of schizophrenia” in which the protagonist/the schizophrenic “is first a fine and good vessel with fine and good things inside of it” before then becoming “misshapen through the ravages of psychosis” and filled with “nasty things.” Eventually, “the wicked thoughts and beheavior that may ensue become inseparable from the person, who is now unrecognizable from what they once were” (29-30). Wang sees the dangers of such a story: the disease becomes fused with the person. 163

And so she understands why mental health advocates promote a grammar in which the two are kept separate. Wang is not a schizophrenic; she is someone with schizoaffective disorder. In the latter formulation, subject and adjective are not inextricably linked. But in her search for an origin, Wang begins to wonder if such untethering is actually helpful for her: “‘Person-first language’ suggests that there is a person in there somewhere without the delusions and the rambling and the catatonia. But what if there isn’t? What happens if I see my disordered mind as a fundamental part of who I am?” (70). Wang is critical of the idea that “there is, deep down, an impeccable self without disorder” (71). She acknowledges that such a theory of an “unblemished self” might be comforting to some – but for her it might be the case that there is “no impeccable self to reach, and if I continue to struggle toward one, I might go mad in the pursuit” (71). Avoiding (further) madness might be one benefit to abandoning this search; but perhaps there’s another: in shifting her focus away from the self, Wang can turn her attention to “a community, a lineage” (5). But before she can do that, she’ll need to find a way to keep herself tethered to reality.

For someone with Wang’s diagnosis, staying connected to reality will prove to be challenging, as the boundaries between reality and fantasy become all too easily blurred. In the essay “The Slender Man, the Nothing, and Me” Wang tells the story of an early friendship with a girl named Jessica. The Nothing of the title is a reference to the film The NeverEnding Story. Released in 1984, when Wang was in the second grade, the story follows a young boy named Bastian who gets absorbed into the make-believe setting of his book: Fantasia. There is an invisible force called “the Nothing” that is threatening to destroy Fantasia and its Empress, who has fallen ill. After seeing the movie, Wang tells her best friend “that we were part of a book, and that the book was being written as we acted” and they recruit another friend, Katie, into their game (117). One of the rules of the game is that they must pretend that the Nothing is real. Eventually, Katie stops playing as she is too scared by Wang’s commitment to this fantasy. When Jessica approaches Wang to confirm that it really is just a game, Wang proclaims: “‘We’re not playing’” and Jessica quits the game too.

Wang is curious about the slippage between the imagination of children – and their childish proclivity to believe in fantasy – and the delusions of an adult. Reflecting on this event in her life, she wonders whether there was “already something vulnerable to fragility lurking deep in 164 my mind … In hindsight, I ask myself how much I truly believed in my own fiction” (119). Given that Wang eventually gives up the game in order to become friends with Jessica again, it’s possible that the answer to her question is that she must not have believed in it all that much. But she goes on to explain how, “When I try to remember how I gave up the fiction, my mind blots out the transition; I have no recollection of telling Jessica that there was no Nothing and no Fantasia, as though the trauma of letting it all go had shattered my memories” (119). The shattering or fragmenting of memory is one of trauma’s common markers: the unconscious blots out that which is too traumatic to process, eventually releasing little slivers of the memory over time, until we’re fully ready to confront it. If the schizophrenias have been with Wang her whole life, as she posited earlier, then cutting the ties between herself and the world she’d created could constitute a traumatic event indeed.

Cutting these ties will prove much more difficult later in life and will result in numerous hospitalizations for Wang. Unlike Khakpour, Wang makes it through the admissions process. In the essay entitled “Towards a Pathology of the Possessed” Wang discusses how she’ll be admitted to psychiatric hospitals, sometimes voluntarily but more often than not against her will. Wang names three involuntary hospitalizations: one in 2002, another in 2003, and then again in 2011. Wang explains how being involuntarily committed almost escapes description – the experience too horrific to convey (39). Perhaps the only thing more terrifying than not knowing when you’ll get to leave, “because no one knows how long you’ll be there,” is the realization that no one will believe anything you say. “We cannot be trusted about anything,” Wang writes, “including our own experiences” (39). In “On the Ward,” Wang recounts how, upon her second hospitalization, she passes a nurse who asks her how she’s doing. Her response – “‘Okay,’ I said, which was true” (98) – is not believed: “The nurse smiled. ‘But how are you really doing?’” (98). Later on, Wang will look at her hospital records to see multiple recordings of the same claim: “patient lacking insight” (98). This moment signifies what Wang refers to as “a primary feature of the experience of staying in a psychiatric hospital”: “you will not be believed about anything. A corollary to this feature,” she goes on to note: “things will be believed about you that are not at all true” (98). Another double-bind for the sick woman: do you try to speak the truth and risk not being believed, or do you not speak at all only to run the risk of being assessed as lacking insight? 165

In order to avoid being characterized as lacking insight (one of the defining symptoms of the schizophrenias) one must come up with strategies to tether them to reality – or at the very least make it appear so to others. In “High Functioning” Wang tells the reader how, “to some degree, the brilliant façade of a good face and a good outfit protects me” (53). For Wang, these signifiers not only allow her to be seen by others as “a wife … a good patient … an entrepreneur,” but they also foster a connection: “I am also schizoaffective, living with schizoaffective disorder, living with mental illness, living with mental health challenges, crazy, insane—but I am just like you” (45). Clothing and makeup become, for Wang, a form of camouflage. For, as Wang notes in a brilliant moment of tongue-and-cheek, “what kind of lunatic has a fashionable pixie cut, wears red lipstick, dresses in pencil skirts, and tucked-in silk blouses? What sort of psychotic wears Loeffler Randall heels without tottering?” (54). Wang will go on to claim that these aesthetic choices are “not merely camouflage” but an “intimidation tactic, as with the porcupine who shows its quills, or the owl that puffs its body in a defensive offensive: dress like everyone should be terrified of you” (56). In some ways, perhaps there is nothing more terrifying than a “psychotic [in] Loeffler Randall heels.”

Much like Gehrig’s #HospitalGlam photos, Wang’s emphasis on aesthetics offers a different image of the sick girl. No longer is she in a nightgown with her unbrushed hair – as is so often the case in the photographs of Augustine. Yet, as Wang acknowledges, there’s only so much a cute haircut and red lipstick can do to conceal the psychosis: “For one season, I saw shadowing demons darting at me from all angles, and I couldn’t control my response, which was to jump to the side or duck or startle at things no one else could see.” Wang describes feeling mortified in these moments, for “It didn’t matter how pulled-together I seemed when I was dodging specters that no one else could see. I knew that I looked crazy, and that no amount of snappy dressing could conceal the dodging” (56). If the sole purpose of Wang’s outfits is to convince the world that she’s “normal,” then it would make sense that she would abandon such a time consuming project. But being high femme is just as integral to Wang’s identity as her schizophrenia is. These acts of getting dressed up are not just for the world around her; they help Wang feel connected to her world, even when the shadows are jumping out at her.

Another strategy that Wang uses to keep herself tethered is self-portraiture. She explains how she takes Polaroids of herself during her worst episodes of psychosis: 166

photography is a tool my sick self uses to believe in what exists … They are a bridge, or a mizpah—a Hebrew noun referring to the emotional ties between people, and especially between people separated by distance or death—between one self and the other. The well person has the job of translating the images that the sick person has left behind as evidence. (166)

Wang creates a catalogue of herself in moments of madness in order to remember that she’s more than this just this moment. They are a gift from her “sick self” to her “well self” and serve as a bridge to connect these two parts that make up a self. But these photos require an exchange: the labour of taking them, of capturing evidence of the sick woman, requires the well person to translate them. And the translation is no easy task. Wang notes how “almost all of the self- portraits I take during severe and prolonged psychosis are blurry and out of focus … I don’t try to create this effect, which happens because I must estimate an accurate focus before stretching my arms out in front of the face” (164). Not only are the photos difficult to decipher through the blur – an all too apt rendering in form of the content of the schizophrenic mind – they present Wang with “facial expressions that make me cringe later, when I see them in lucidity, because I don’t recognize them, and because they are ugly in their attempt to approximate grins” (164). Creating this bridge between the sick self and the well requires a confrontation with the grotesque nature of the performance: “When I examine them now, I wonder why. Why did I cover my face with my hand, particularly when I couldn’t see my face in the lens? Why the grimace? What is that performance meant for?” (164).

I can almost imagine Augustine asking herself these same questions, were she ever to see the photographs taken of her at the Salpêtrière. If this were the case, the performance of the facial expression that approximates a grin, would be for the doctor. In Wang’s case, however, the loss of autonomy experienced by Augustine vis-à-vis being the subject of the doctor’s gaze, is here reversed. Recalling Roland Barthes’s discussion of photography in Camera Lucida, Wang becomes both subject and object the moment she takes this photograph.26 She is the one in control of the camera; the only one tasked with interpreting the photograph. The fact that she doesn’t share these photographs with others is significant then. She refuses to let her visage become evidence for anyone other than herself.27 167

There are other photographs Wang takes, however, that are meant for others: her Instagram sick- girl selfies. If the Polaroids are a bridge between Wang’s sick self and her well self, the Instagram selfies she posts can be read as serving a similar purpose. When Wang takes a selfie and posts it to Instagram, she is creating a bridge between her many selves and the many selves of her followers. And she is also capturing the bridge that’s been built between herself and Khakpour, as though to say: just because you’re sick, doesn’t mean you have to be alone.

When Wang originally began posting sick-girl selfies she did so for the purpose of evidence. In an essay from 2016 entitled “I’m Chronically Ill and Afraid of Being Lazy,” Wang notes how she posts selfies on Instagram as a way to say, “Look! I am sick!” (see fig. 7)

Fig. 7: “Today I was flattened by fatigue and pain again” [Image ID: a selfie of Wang with her head on her pillow and her eyes closed.]

Along with this image from Wang’s Instagram, she explains how “Instead of bragging online and in person about how much work I’ve accomplished, I post selfies from my bed, as if to prove that I am, indeed, ill.” Recalling how Wang’s insurance coverage was taken away after a private investigator noted that Wang didn’t fit his criteria for being sick, it makes a lot of sense that Wang would turn to Instagram and create this evidence.

While the selfies began as being for others, their evidentiary purpose eventually changes, and the photos become evidence for Wang herself. In a post from Jan 10, 2017, Wang’s motivations for posting selfies appear to have shifted. In the caption for this photo she writes: “My apologies for 168 the deluge of IV-rom selfies. Somehow it’s good to know that I’m still me, even through all of this disability and illness stuff” (see fig. 8).

True to form, Wang is donning her red lipstick and a fashionable headband. In the caption, it becomes clear that Wang is not alone when this photograph is taken: Khakpour is with her. “Our mornings are spent helping each other through the process of taking various things before we get going – all of this time has been highly focused on health and illness, but has been enlivened too by the presence of a friend who is going through the same dumb things as I am,” Wang tells her followers.

Fig. 10: “My apologies for the deluge of IV-room selfies” [Image ID: a selfie of Wang’s face and upper body. She’s wearing a white shirt, emerald green headband, red lipstick and glasses. There are tubes in her nose.]

In an interview for Electric Literature, “Why Is It Illness That Makes You See Us,” Khakpour and Wang discuss the role their friendship has played in their lives – and the role of community more broadly. Khakpour tells Wang: “One thing I think about a lot, for instance, is how important it is to connect with people, and to have friendship and love and support because it is so incredibly unstable.” The two talk about their relationship with each other, as well as their relationship to social media, and Khakpour notes how she sees the work they both do on social media as service work: “To be like, ‘I need help, and I wanna reach out to people; and maybe also me sharing helps someone, too.’” One only has to look through the comments on their 169

Instagram accounts to see that the vulnerable act of taking a sickness selfie and posting it for the whole world to see does, indeed, help countless others.

When you scroll through their Instagram feeds you’ll come across countless sick-girl selfies: some while trapped in bed, some while waiting for more IV treatments at the hospital, but others where Wang and Khakpour are out in the world – oxygen tanks and canes in tow. Amongst these photographs are many of Wang and Khakpour together. In The Collected Schizophrenias, Wang recounts going to Santa Fe with Khakpour, after Khakpour insisted “that we visit the pilgrimage site of Chimayó… for a nine-day round of medical treatments, and the combination of baseline chronic illness and intensive doctor’s appointments” (172). Wang describes how she and her friend sat “in the IV room of an integrative healthcare clinic … facing each other in enormous leather chairs with oxygen tubes in our noses and IV needles taped to our veins” (172).

In my favourite photo of the two, captioned “blood sisters,” Wang and Khakpour are disembodied by the framing of the photograph: all we get are two arms, bandaged at the elbow, and a glimpse of a torso.28 This framing mirrors the way that chronic illness can make us feel detached from our bodies. And yet this image of two arms, with their respective yellow and pink bandages and the caption “blood sisters,” speaks to the ways that sick women are refusing to be isolated. They are building a bridge to each other.

In her interview with Tin House, Khakpour writes: “Nothing I feel is more deadly than the isolation we especially experience in the West. I truly believe we are pack animals and we need each other, much more than we want to admit.” And so we must form new modes of kinship and affiliation. I’m reminded here of Pastava’s discussion of leakiness: “when we recognize the leakiness of pain, we can begin to conceptualize bodies, desires, and experiences (pain, shared, and otherwise) within systems of connectivity. My experience of living with pain leaks onto those around me in a way that cannot be contained by the boundary of my body or my experience” (214). The possibility of leakiness is here, albeit covered by Band-Aids. Wang and Khakpour are obviously not blood sisters in the literal sense of the phrase. They become sisters by way of the IV treatments that they often get together.

What I see in this photo is not only an acknowledgment of their relationship, but two arms reaching out to the world of other sick women that exist beyond the frame: those lying in bed, 170 phones in hand, double-clicking to “like” this photo. In their essay “Sick Woman Theory,” Johanna Hedva notes how they used to believe that the most anti-capitalist gesture could be found in writing a love poem to someone you desired. But Hedva since changed their mind:

The most anti-capitalist protest is to care for another and to care for yourself. To take on the historically feminized and therefore invisible practice of nursing, nurturing, caring. To take seriously each other’s vulnerability and fragility and precarity, and to support it, honor it, empower it. To protect each other, to enact and practice community. A radical kinship, an interdependent sociality, a politics of care. (Section 6)

It is in the sickness selfies, with their accompanying hashtags, that I see this politics of care being enacted: the invisible illness and the invisible women who suffer are made present as they invite a world of strangers into their most intimate and fragile moments.

These images bring the sick woman out of hiding, enable her to take control of the camera that was once used to pathologize and dehumanize her. The sick-girl selfie marks a desire to connect with the world outside of the bedroom or the hospital or the other spaces that the sick body is confined. The ideology of ableism, a crucial component of the neoliberal world, focuses on what the sick-girl cannot do – because she’s too weak to get out of bed, she cannot hold down a job and cannot possibly live a full life. But when we untether the good life from the productive drive of late capitalism, we can turn our focus to caring for one another and for seeing what is still possible despite of, or in spite of sickness. Just as hope, to borrow Wang’s words, “is a cast line in search of fish” (182), potentiality cannot make any promises. In Wang’s case, she’ll never “be completely free of the schizophrenias” (186) just as both her and Khakpour may never experience a life free of late-stage Lyme disease. But this cast line can offer up other things instead: friendship, community, something to hold onto.

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Chapter Notes

1 Andrew Keen refers to the selfie as “Advertisements for Myself.” In an interview with Catherine Maddux, Keen proclaims that the selfie is “the quintessential, almost inevitable conclusion, where all we are left with is ourselves. We’re not able to see anything in the world except ourselves. What the Internet has done has placed us at the center of the universe. It’s a delusion.” See also: McCain et al.; Nauret; Walker; and Weiser.

2 For readings of the move from self-portraits to selfies, see: Levin; Murray; Rettberg; and Suler.

3 In their introduction to “What Does the Selfie Say?: Investigating a Global Phenomenon,” Theresa M. Senft and Nancy K. Baym argue that, “Perhaps the most obvious argument to be made against conceptualizing selfies as only acts of vanity or narcissism is the fact that as a genre, selfies consist of far more than stereotypical young girls making duck faces in their bathrooms. When people pose for political selfies, joke selfies, sports-related selfies, fan-related selfies, illness-related selfies, soldier selfies, crime-related selfies, selfies at funerals, or selfies at places like museums, we need more accurate language than that afforded by 19th-century psychoanalysis to speak about what people believe themselves to be doing, and what response they are hoping to elicit.” They go on to note that the pathologizing language that has attached itself to discussions of the selfie reflects moral panic (1592) that is inflected with racism and sexism; for selfies provide a platform for those who’re marginalized to speak out about the forces of power that oppress them. For one example, see Nemer and Freeman. For other arguments against the claim that selfies are narcissitic see also: Tiidenberg and Burns; Goldberg offers an interesting intervention into this conversation, arguing that instead of leaving the label of narcissism behind, we need to focus on “the ‘hype’ of selfies as narcissistic in order to identify and ultimately trouble the political unconscious of this diagnosis, and to ask, what is the problem of narcissism such that it can serve as a means of devaluing, and what kind of politics might we find in the behaviors, proclivities, or attributes identified as narcissistic?” (1).

4 For more on the relationship between selfies and diaries, see Jill W. Rettberg’s Seeing Ourselves Through Technology. And for a discussion of selfies and auto/biographical writing, see Hannah Westley’s “Reading the Self in Selfies.” Westley questions whether we can read the 172

selfie as constituting an autobiographical narrative, eventually concluding that, “once posted to a media platform [selfies] can be seen to constitute a narrative” (376). Westley goes on to claim that, “selfies function both as bounded texts, identity images that are open to narrative interpretation, and that they are part of an ongoing story, a multitude of overlapping images that give rise to a narrative of identity” (376). See also: Smith and Watson; Poletti and Rack.

5 And, of course, these stakes are even higher for trans women of colour and non-binary BIPOC. See coda for further discussion. For more on the health care challenges faced by the queer and trans community, see Zena Sharman’s collection of essays: The Remedy: Queer and Trans Voices on Health and Health Care.

6 In The History of Sexuality, Volume 3: The Care of the Self, Foucault explains how, in the Golden Age of Rome, caring for the self could not be detached from the act of caring for others. Foucault explains how one act of caring for the self involved the continual pursuit of knowledge, in which teachers and educators would provide spiritual direction within the space of the classroom or lecture hall. Thus, “one of the most important aspects of this activity devoted to oneself,” writes Foucault, is that “it constituted, not an exercise in solitude, but a true social practice” (51). And this is just one form of social relation in service of the care for the self. Foucault also notes how relations of “kinship, friendship, and obligation” provide ample opportunities to improve the self, thus adding another layer of richness to this pre-existing relationship: “But it is sometimes that case, too, that the interplay of care of the self and the help of the other blends into preexisting relations, giving them a new coloration and a greater warmth. The care of the self—of the attention on devotes to the care that others should take of themselves—appears then as an intensification of social relations” (53).

7 Unsurprisingly, there is little to no information about the prevalence of autoimmune diseases amongst trans and gender non-conforming (GNC) folks. Due to the dangers of medicalized transphobia, those who’re trans and GNC are less likely to seek out medical care. The studies that I reference throughout this chapter focus specifically on cisgender women. For more on trans experiences within healthcare, see: The Remedy: Queer and Trans Voices on Health and Healthcare. 173

8 Anne Elizabeth Moore notes how, according to a 2001 study at the University of Maryland, “In emergency rooms, for example, women wait for pain medication an average of sixteen minutes longer than men, and are 13 to 25 percent less likely to receive an opioid medication” (98). The study that Moore is referring to is Hoffmann and Tarzian’s “The Girl Who Cried Pain: A Bias Against Women in the Treatment of Pain.”

9 For other accounts please see Sarah Mangusso’s Two Kinds of Decay: “My symptoms were so unlikely, by the book, that despite my reports of them, they were assumed not to exist” (30); Amy Berkowitz’s Tender Points: “Today, in the absence of visible symptoms or clear etiology, some doctors dismiss fibromyalgia in a similar way. Patients may be sent home with prescriptions for anti-depressants and hardly any acknowledgment of their physical pain” (91); Abby Norman’s Ask Me About My Uterus: A Quest to Make Doctor’s Believe: “By the time the doctor came in to examine me, I was even more exhausted than when I’d arrived. I was aware that I was still crying, and worried that while crying I couldn’t possibly present my situation rationally. The doctor seemed completed unsurprised by my distress. I was a Sarah Lawrence girl—historically what you might call ‘bright and wound tight.’ He assumed that my issue was of a sexual nature … I was discharged without so much as a CT scan” (14-15); and Laurie Edwards’ “The Gender Gap in Pain”: “I was 23 before I was given a correct diagnosis of a rare genetic lung disease called primary ciliary dyskinesia. I’d been sick since birth, but long diagnostic journeys are occupational hazards of living with conditions doctors don’t often see. Still, my journey was unnecessarily protracted by my doctors’ dismissal of my symptoms as those of a neurotic young woman.”

10 See Leyland Cecco.

11 Samuels also points out how those who receive biocertification will have to provide one medical certification after another, in countless settings, and with great regularity: “Even those with permanent and unchanging impairments, such as loss of a limb or irreversible paralysis, must often file form after form, year after year, to maintain their legal and economic status as disabled” (123). In one example, Samuels looks at the 1994 documentary film When Billy Broke His Head, which features a former concert pianist named Kay who’s gone blind. Despite the 174

prognosis that she’ll never be able to regain her sight, Kay holds up a thirty-four-page form sent by the Social Security Administration that she must fill out. The irony that a blind woman must fill in a form that she cannot see only adds to the frustration and exhaustion that comes from what feels like a never-ending series of forms that need filling. It is this doubling down of ableism (the exhaustion that any able-bodied person feels at such a task is only amplified for those who are sick and disabled) is one way that the state works to deter its subjects from seeking government support.

12 See Bahadur, King, Meunter, and Sicardi.

13 See pages 2-3 in introduction.

14 Charcot, “Leçons sur les maladies du système nerveux,” in Oeuvres completes III (3-4).

15 As Didi-Huberman notes, “Men did not enter the Salpêtrière as patients until June 21, 1881” when the outpatient clinic opened. And it was “not until 1888 that one could contemplate the photographed traits of a hysterical man” (80).

16 “Banquet offert à M. le professeur Charcot,” Progrès médical, II (1883): 999. Quoted in Showalter, Hystories (30).

17 This is the citation given by Didi-Huberman alongside the translation in The Invention of Hysteria (83). See also Asti Hustvedt’s Medical Muses (190-192).

18 As Elaine Showalter notes in Hystories: “Freud announced his new theory in another letter to Fliess, listing the reasons he had been forced to abandoned his seduction hypothesis. First, the theory did not lead to therapeutic success. Second, the incidence of fathers abusing children would be improbably vast, because it would have to exceed the incidence of hysteria. Third, no one could distinguish between truth and fantasy in narratives elicited from the unconscious. And finally memories of abuse never surfaced expect when his patients were under hypnosis” (40).

19 Abby Norman, and countless other sick women have noted, “The discourse on the ills of women, not just in the psychological and medical community, but culturally, almost always includes a diagnosis of hysteria” (111). It’s no coincidence that women seeking medical attention 175

for chronic illnesses are commonly diagnosed as having “conversion disorder,” the American Psychiatric Association’s new name for what was once called hysteria. As Kate Horowitz’s points out in her essay, “Performance of a Lifetime: On Invisible Illness, Gender, and Disbelief”: “Women are also far more likely than men to be diagnosed with conversion disorder, which was rebranded as ‘functional neurological disorder’ by the American Psychiatric Association in 2013. The term ‘conversion disorder’ was itself a rebranding. For nearly 2,000 years, it was simply called hysteria.”

20 Asti Hustvedt points out that Freud’s statement was uttered sixteen years after Bourneville wrote of his patient Geneviève: “In their delirium, hysterics have reminiscences of past events from their lives, physical pains as well as emotions they experienced, and most especially, perhaps, of the events that were the cause of their attacks” (194). Original quotation can be found on page 97 of the Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière, vol. 1.

21 In an interview with Jane Ratcliffe for Tin House, Khakpour expands on the trauma of misdiagnosis and dismissal: “It took a huge toll and continues to take a toll. I have so much trauma around this. I have many forms of PTSD with different origins—all sorts of health PTSD, but this is one of the worst. You go through years of this—I have literally been in tears begging and pleading with doctors for years and years. It destroys you to have to do this again and again and it bleeds—pun intended!—into other aspects of your life too. It’s hard for me to have “normal” conversations around illness, whatever that is. I am always somehow defensive. I am always ready to think the worst which has been interesting because lately more and more people seem to actually recognize Lyme and other forms of chronic illness, so sometimes I am ready for battle in a battlefieldless zone.” Sonya Huber describes a similar trauma in Pain Woman Takes Your Keys and Other Essays from a Nervous System: “I’m terrified of the doctor’s office. I go in and I minimize. I shrug. I am bold in other settings but, as a result of pain at the hands of doctors, of dismissal, I have a kind of health-care anxiety that makes me elide what I know to be true for fear of being branded emotional, hysterical, psychosomatic” (30).

22 Sick: A Memoir has been featured in The New Yorker, Slate, Vogue, The Cut, HuffPost, Vice, Bitch Media, Women’s Review of Books, The Rumpus, Electric Literature, Paper Mag, AV Club, Girlboss.com, Tin House, Pacific Standard, Brooklyn Digest, Brooklyn Fans, Befrois, The 176

Furious Gazelle, Longreads, and Punctuate. It has made The Washington Post’s What Your Favourite Authors are Reading This Summer, The Boston Globe’s 23 Most Anticipated Books of 2018, Buzzfeed’s The 33 Most Exciting New Books of 2018, Bustle’s 28 Most Anticipated Nonficiton Books of 2018 and Best Nonfiction in June, Nylon’s 50 Books We Can’t Wait to Read in 2018 and 46 Great Books to Read This Summer. And the list goes on. For the rest of this list please see Instagram Post: June 9, 2018.

23 In her essay “The Bodymind Problem and the Possibilities of Pain,” Price draws on the work done by materialist feminism to define the concept of bodymind as “a sociopolitically constituted and material entity that emerges through both structural (power- and violence-laden) contexts and also individual (specific) experience” (271). While Price gestures towards those who experience chronic pain, her analysis is focused specifically on the pain experienced by those with various mental health diagnoses, and her own personal experience with psychosis. For one of the few pieces of disability studies writing on chronic body pain, see Alyson Patsavas’s “Recovering a Cripistemology of Pain: Leaky Bodies, Connective Tissue, and Feeling Discourse” in the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies.

24 For more on the ways that experiences of oppression impact the mental and physical health of people of color see Dovidio and Fiske; Sawyer et al.; Shavers, Klein, and Fagan; Smedley; Harrell, Burford, et al.; Sternthal, Slopen, and Williams; Viruell;Fuentes; Walters et al.

25 One doctor who believes in this relationship is palliative care physician Dr. Gabor Maté. In his national bestseller, When the Body Says No: the Cost of Hidden Stress, Maté argues that those with chronic illnesses also share a variety of characteristics, including a history of trauma.25 Amongst the illnesses cited by Maté are multiple sclerosis (MS), Crohn’s disease, autoimmune disorders, fibromyalgia, endometriosis, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis – more commonly known as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease. Maté notes in the opening pages that “excessive emotional involvement with a parent, a lack of psychological independence, an overwhelming need for love and affection, and the inability to feel or express anger have long been identified by medical observers as possible factors in the natural development of [MS]” (16). He’ll go on to describe how, “The life histories of people with ALS invariably tell of emotional deprivation or loss in childhood … Characterizing the personalities of ALS patients is relentless self-drive, 177

reluctance to acknowledge the need for help and the denial of pain whether physical or emotional” (43). It is perhaps worth nothing that the doctor who discovered ALS was no other than Jean-Martin Charcot. In fact, Charcot would not have discovered ALS without dissecting the brains of his hysterics.

26 “The photograph (the one I intend) represents the very subtle moment when, to tell the truth, I an neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object: I then experience a micro-version of death (of parenthesis): I am truly becoming a specter” (14).

27 Sonya Huber, who lives with rheumatoid arthritis, describes a similar impulse: “I’ve shared ridiculous self-portraits, including pictures of my head wrapped in a ‘Terrible Towel’ to cheer on the Pittsburgh Steelers in a Super Bowl. I take self-portraits with my face askew, and I think they are funny … I share these with friends who know the inanity of my face when animated. But I want to protect this other woman, the pain woman, who is not yet able to speak like my normal self. The images of her are private notes towards a story. When I take pictures of her, I am pulling my face up out of nothingness. I think this is why I photograph her. As I capture her, I am trying to love her in the way one might welcome a long-lost relative, a woman linked by blood but whom I barely know. That woman is dazed from a long journey and needs to be guided back to her life” (85). 28 Unfortunately, I was not granted copyright permissions for this photo. You can view it here: www.instagram.com/p/BPHLgMMjznS/.

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Coda: Soft Future | Future Templates; or, Femme4Femme Intimacy as an Act of World Building

I started writing this dissertation in 2014, and by 2016 I was sick and my sickness radically transformed my writing. It’s now 2020 and the world itself is sick. There is, quite literally, a global pandemic caused by the corona virus or COVID-19. It is a wild time to be alive; and it is a wild time to be submitting my dissertation. How do we respond to the call of “touch me, I’m sick,” while quarantined in our homes? What forms does intimacy take when we can’t be in the same room as those we love? In many ways, these questions informed the last chapter, where I looked at models for building intimacy and care through online platforms such as Instagram.

What I’d like to focus on in these closing pages is what this pandemic, this sickness, has made possible. This is not so much a reparative reading as it is my queer femme utopian longing for the world that we’ll be living in when all of this is over: a soft future. Because there’s no way we’re going back to what was normal before. What we’re witnessing is a collective awakening to the trauma of living under capitalism; to the grief we’re all holding within us; and new forms of intimacy and care that we may never have thought possible before these uncertain times. In what follows, I’ll offer some scenes of intimacy during times of quarantine. My hope is that you’ll find within the possibility that has animated “Touch Me, I’m Sick: Hysterical Intimacies | Sick Theories.”

Femme4Femme Intimacy; or Towards a Soft Future

“So what’s your dissertation about?” he asks me, lying on his bed, wearing a black lacy thong.

“It’s about trauma and chronic illness and intimacy and queer sexuality,” I respond, doing my best to give my Cliffs Notes version.

“Are you gonna write about this?” – and by “this” he means us, two strangers, both of us femmes, one non-binary, the other gender fluid, having sex during the COVID-19 pandemic.

I laugh, “Yeah, actually, I am.”

“Good,” he tells me, a smile across his face. 179

***

It’s late August, seven months into the pandemic. I’m in Toronto for a few weeks to support one of my best friends as they have top surgery. I knew that returning home during the pandemic would look different from the last trip I took back in December, just a few months before the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic and cities across the world began to shut down. There would be no hugging. No touching. Losses that I would feel deeply within my touch-oriented friendships. But we were committed to figuring it out, not wanting to pass up the opportunity to be together after seven months apart.

The trickiest part of my stay will be figuring out how to navigate hook ups. I want to make the most of my time here and so I create a Tinder profile: “Polyam femme witch/switch, cancer sun, sag rising, aries moon. Super into talking about feelings, transformative justice, and the queer utopia. Looking for playful makeout sessions, sexual chemistry, kink super welcome. Am in Toronto until the end of Aug and would love to navigate COVID connection with consent and care.”

I quickly match with Jonathan.1 I immediately thought he was beautiful, with his long curly black hair, dark brown eyes, and nails painted a sparkly black. But it was the presence of the word femme in his bio that made me excited to swipe right. We exchanged Instagrams and then quickly started texting. As we discussed a time to meet up and see if the chemistry was there, he offers to send me some nudes, to which I enthusiastically say yes. The next day I wake up to a number of photos of Jonathan in various stages of undress. In my favourites, he is wearing fishnets and a thong. In another, there is a jewelled butt plug in his ass. I send him some of me in lacy lingerie.

In between nudes, we discuss our boundaries and what we need to feel safe.

“You don’t mind being around someone smoking weed do you?” he asks.

I pause and reflect on this question. I knew he smoked weed because in many of his Tinder pictures there’s a joint in his mouth. In the past, this would’ve been a deal breaker for me. 180

“It’s something I can be around,” I text back, “but just for full disclosure, I’ve been sober from drugs for 10 years. Addiction was something I really struggled with and so I tend to not spend time around folks who’re smoking weed. But given the circumstances I think it’ll be fine.”

I hit send and then nervously compose a follow up message: “Hope that’s okay—always feels a bit vulnerable to disclose that.” This is the first time I’m allowing myself to be with someone who uses substances since I got sober. The last time I did this, almost ten years ago, I ended up using again. And while I no longer feel the urge to get high, I worry that being around drugs will trigger a trauma response.

As if anticipating my fear, he asks me: “Does the smell of weed trigger you?”

I feel my body sighing at this question, a sign that I feel within my window of tolerance – a term I learnt in therapy that describes when our ventral vagal nerve, which controls our sense of safety and ability to be present, is activated.

“I’m not sure. But my body isn’t freaking out at the idea, so I think that’s a good sign :)”

“I get smell linked to trauma all too well” he texts back. “I also have visual scars from interpersonal issues from the past so trauma hasn’t been hard for me to shy away from.”

The capacity to name their traumas is one of the many reasons I find myself surrounded by femmes. Without knowing the details, we accept from the start that trauma lives within our bodies. It isn’t something that we have to hide from one another.

After sharing little details about our trauma histories – he doesn’t know his birth parents, and both of mine are dead – I suggest that we talk about how we’re practicing harm reduction while hooking up. It feels easy to transition from talking about our trauma to our forthcoming intimacy.

“I basically ask people how they protect themselves from the outside and [if] it is equal to or greater than mine it check out. Not tooooo sure what else to do. Also have sanitizer when I walk in.”

I share some of the precautions I’m taking – socially distanced hangs with pals, only sleeping with one person at a time outside of my partnership. “I have an autoimmune disease, so I have to 181 be super careful.” We talk about who’s in our bubble and he tells me that he’ll let me know if he hooks up with anyone else in between seeing me so that we can wait a few days before hooking up again. Even with all of the precautions, we both know that it’s a risk to fuck. And at the same time, if this is the way that the world is going to be for the foreseeable future, we need to figure out how to access the pleasure of sex and intimacy in the meantime.

***

Many people I know in the polyamory community have been talking about harm reduction approaches to sex. In her Radical Love Letters series, my friend and fellow activist and academic Raechel Anne Jolie reflects on how “abstinence-like models of remedy,” which promote only interacting with those in your household ends up privileging “not just people who had physical homes in which to live, but very specifically, monogamous people who live with their partners/bio-families.” Raechel goes on to argue: “it behooves [sic] us to pause when we are told that protecting human life must simultaneously uphold systems that harm us … we have to think critically when the onus of stopping a pandemic falls to individuals and their actions rather than structural forms of care and support.”

Alongside questioning whose care is privileged, I can’t help but wonder: whose pleasure is privileged? The very people who are the most concerned about protecting those most vulnerable to COVID-19 (immunocompromised folks, the working-class poor, homeless, incarcerated, and Black, Indigenous, people of colour) are also the ones who’re asking the questions that Raechel poses:

Can we keep each other safe and also keep joy alive? Can we both make responsible individual decisions that protect the most vulnerable among us, and also direct our ire toward the State rather than toward our friends who have decided to consensually hang out with other friends without masks? Can we concede that a quick, masked hug between two consenting adults may be something toward which our bodies begin to urgently move? Can we draw on the spirit of our queer ancestors who knew that connection is all at once dangerous, life-giving, and also impossible to withhold? 182

I read Raechel’s questions and my body says yes, yes, yes. If anyone can imagine these possibilities, it’s femmes.

Historically, femme identity has been understood as being the counterpart to butch lesbian identity.2 Sadly, without the butch lesbian, the queer femme is all too often misread as straight: an act that has become known as “femme erasure.” The irony of the internalized misogyny inherent in this misreading – that as a femme, you can only be read as queer in relation to someone who looks like a man – has been taken up by queer femmes with the hashtag Femme4Femme, which works to draw attention to the ways that femmes desire bodies other than those that are masculine of centre.3

Not only do femmes face erasure, they must also deal with rampant femmephobia from feminists and queers who believe that to be feminine is to consign yourself to the gendered expectations of the patriarchy. I’m reminded of Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s proclamation: “Forget femme invisibility; the thing most femmes I know are impacted by the lack of femme respect” (137) – which is only heightened for trans women and non-binary femmes of colour.4 For Piepzna-Samarasinha, this lack of respect is informed by the belief that femininity and femmeness is “weak, less than, not as smart or competent, ‘hysterical,’ ‘too much,’ and not as worth of praise or respect” (137). To be femme (and feminine) is to be sick: “hysterical” and “too much.” And so Piepzna-Samarasinha will go on to write in her essay “Two or Three Things I Know for Sure About Femmes and Suicide”: “Being perceived as too much can kill you” (195). It is this logic of pathologization that informs femmephobia. Femmes are the original hysterics. Or, perhaps another way of saying this is: hysterics are always already femme.

To be femme is to refuse the valorization of the individual and of independence that the cisheteropatriarchy loves so much. What femmes recognize is the power of interdependence: that we need one another in order to live. Like Hannah Harris-Sutro, I see femme as “a way of being and relating to the people we date and fuck, a way of being and relating that comprises anything and everything about femininity that feels good, excising anything and everything about femininity that hurts.” If the future is femme, which I believe it is, then it is full of pleasure and possibility. 183

Femmes are the ultimate dreamers of care and intimacy. It’s not surprising to me that my fellow femmes are actively crafting templates for intimacy in the midst of a global pandemic. Because femmes are always already sick, we understand that our mental health is inextricably linked to our physical health, and so in staying away from those with whom we practice intimacy, pleasure, and care, we’re also putting our bodyminds at risk. And so I return to Raechel’s final question: “Can we draw on the spirit of our queer ancestors who knew that connection is all at once dangerous, life-giving, and also impossible to withhold?”

***

I arrive at Jonathan’s place the night after we meet. I’m anxious. And not because I know that we’re about to have sex. In between my legs, right at the top, is an eruption of red spots. Eczema. Since birth I’ve been haunted by dry skin that transforms into a rash at the blink of an eye. Atopic dermatitis. You can see it in my baby photos: cheeks aflame. As a preteen, it’d flare up conveniently the day before picture day, just above my lip. Waves of shame would come over me as I prepared myself for yet another rashy yearbook photo.

None of that would prepare me for the ways that eczema would take over my arms and legs after I began high school. I’d wake up in the morning with swollen red blisters, oozing and inflamed all down the insides of my calves, the backs of my knees, and inside of my elbow. As a young girl full of hormones, and who equated sex with love, the worst part of my eczema wasn’t the pain or the constant itch: it was the shame and fear I felt whenever I thought about my legs being exposed during sex. I’d turn off the lights and take extra precautions by removing my pants underneath the blanket. I masked my shame with coyness and it worked. But I was always dreading the moment where my red, pusing legs would be revealed.

I could never find a pattern for my flare-ups. Dermatologists have long understood the link between stress and eczema outbreaks. But what if your whole life is under constant stress? What do you do then? Doctors still aren’t sure what causes eczema, but recent research is showing that there is a connection between the parasympathetic nervous system and atopic dermatitis. Polyvagal Theory has demonstrated how our autonomic nervous system functions through the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) and the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS).5 Our SNS controls our fight-or-flight response. Our PNS controls our ventral vagal system, which is our 184 optimal state of engagement, and our dorsal vagal system, which controls our freeze and submit responses. When you live with trauma, your SNS and PNS are under chronic stress, and chronic stress causes autonomic imbalance, greater sensitization, and triggers the massive histamine release associated with atopic dermatitis inflammation.

Given that the most traumatic years of my life happened between ages eleven to twenty-one, I can see why these years were also riddled with flare up after flare up. If I couldn’t talk about and process my mother’s death when I was eleven, or the rape that happened the summer before high school and the slut shaming that came after, or the years of having my needs and identity erased because all that mattered was my father and brother, then my body would speak it for me.

Standing here at his front door, aware of the red itchy pain in between my legs, I worry about how Jonathan will respond when all is revealed. I tell myself that Jonathan won’t notice. And if he does, it won’t matter.

He opens the door in a robe, and I can see the hint of a black lacy bra underneath. Eventually, as we undress one another, I can see the care and pleasure he took in getting ready for me. He moves his body as femmes often do. Wrapping his legs around mine, he pushes his ass up into the air so that I can observe his soft brown skin next to black lace. When he fucks me, my legs wide open and up in the air, he moves his hands alongside the inside of my thighs, overtop of my eczema, and keeps fucking. In this moment, I feel how queerness makes it possible for us to find pleasure in loving our sick and traumatized bodies.

Afterwards, sweaty and out of breath, he is the little spoon. I trace my fingers over his skin, and he shivers. Laying there wrapped up in each other, he dozes off. I must have been falling asleep too because I’m suddenly awoken: his arms and legs start to spasm, contract, and then relax. They go through the same motions again and again. I feel him move his shoulders and hear the bones crunch and crack underneath the skin. Then he shoots up. Awoken by his own body.

“Does that always happen when you sleep?” I ask.

“Yeah. Used to be way worse. Sleep paralysis. Eventually it stopped freaking me out.” 185

I want to ask him more questions, but then he’s asleep again. As I lay there beside him, I think of the hysterics at the Salpêtrière Hospital. In the photographs, you see their bodies in various states of contraction and contortion. Their bodies trying to speak the trauma that their mouths cannot.

I understand this all too well. Eczema. Fibromyalgia. My body attempting to speak the unspeakable. The etymology of the word eczema confirms my suspicion that these red rashes are inextricably linked to my trauma. Eczema: “something thrown out by heat.” Trauma as heat. Eczema as that which is thrown out of the body, externalizing that which is internal. If inflammation can talk to the brain, then my body was trying to talk to me. I’m learning how important it is to listen. I will not gaslight myself as Freud once did with his hysterics.

I am a hysteric, and so is this femme that I’m fucking. With this knowledge, a sense of calm comes over me. I lay there, letting his body communicate with me. I want him to know that I’m listening.

We’d continue to see each other many times over the next two weeks. One day I show up wearing a black lace body suit and Jonathan takes photos of me. I have a hard time finding myself sexy in photographs. But with Jonathan behind the camera, his hands reaching out to move my head back, I find that I’m excited to see the results. Then he joins me. Our legs – mine bare, his in black pantyhose – contort and twist together, and we transform trauma into pleasure and intimacy.

***

Back in Calgary, I tell my therapist about Jonathan and I’s last day together. “One of his trauma responses is to talk a lot. But sometimes it feels like he’s talking at me, not with me. And that makes me feel like I don’t really matter. Triggers all of my sexual trauma from being a teenager, when I used to believe that boys fucked me because they liked me. This story enabled me to ignore that the sex we had was rarely consensual. Underneath, I knew that they just saw me as another girl they could get high and then use. I meant nothing to them.”

“Did you tell him this?” she asks me. 186

“Yeah – maybe not in so many words. At first I wasn’t quite sure what to say. So he went and had a shower and when he came back I was ready. I told him how the fact that he never really asks me questions makes me feel like he doesn’t really care about getting to know me. But maybe that’s just what hooking up is like for him.”

“And how did he respond?”

“He said, ‘I get that. I guess I feel like I already know so much about you because you share so openly on your Instagram. But I don’t waste time with people.’ He points then to a scar on his arm, from when he tried to commit suicide. ‘I’ve already wasted so much time.’ And then he tells me how he feels safe with me. That he doesn’t normally fall asleep while cuddling with the person he just had sex with.”

In recounting my experiences with Jonathan, I realize that not once during our time together did I get triggered. Not by the pot smoke (which was copious). Not by hooking up (also copious). According to my therapist, this is Stage 3 of trauma work: future templates, or integration and living without dissociation.

In trauma recovery, Stage 1 is finding stabilization (me, starting somatic therapy after spending the summer of 2017 in a near constant state of dissociation). Stage 2 is reprocessing (three years of weekly therapy later, and we still haven’t touched all of my trauma, but I know that we’ve reprocessed a lot). In Stage 3, you start to use the new neural pathways you’ve created and instead of getting triggered by a smell, event, scenario, your frontal cortex knows that this time is different.

I ask my therapist how this is possible – how did I manage to do this on my own? – and she tells me that it’s not so much the memories themselves that need to be reprocessed, but the stories and beliefs attached to them. I think back on all of the work we’ve done so far: the trauma of my mother’s death when I was eleven and all of the emotional abuse and neglect I suffered under my father. I now know that all parts of me are deserving of love. That I am loveable. It becomes clear that these same stories drove me, in the wake of being raped, to seek out the love of so many adolescent boys. In offering them my body, I was hoping to affirm that I was loveable. 187

We’ve yet to really talk about these traumas in our therapy sessions. I’ve named them enough that my therapist knows what I’m talking about. We’ve only just started to return to those memories, which are, really, just fragments of memories. But that doesn’t matter. Because I know that the story attached to these traumas isn’t true. This is how I find myself doing something that I used to do, something attached to so much trauma, without dissociating: fucking a boy I don’t know, during an eczema outbreak, pot smoke around me. Instead, my frontal cortex tells my trauma responses that this time is different, that they don’t need to protect me. Without knowing it, I’ve reprocessed and integrated years of traumatic memories. This is the magic of Femme4Femme intimacy.

***

I want a future that is soft.

In her essay, “The Cultural Politics of Softness” another femme friend, Andi Schwartz, describes softness as “a general orientation to the world that foregrounds vulnerability, emotionality, and earnestness.” Making the link between softness, trauma, and healing, Andi writes: “Softness is not ‘showing up’ as a temporary, band-aid solution for superficial pain, it is showing up, hoping to transform others and the entire socio-political terrain with our radical honesty and vulnerability. In its queer and feminist context, softness is the place from which we can build better political principles, the place from which we can build a better world.”

I read her words and I’m reminded of Staci K. Haines’ book The Politics of Trauma. Haines is one of the co-founders of generative somatics, a field of therapeutic work for trauma survivors that believes that healing from trauma requires us to be in better relation with our bodies, or soma, as that is where trauma lives. “Embodiment,” writes Haines, “encourages us to keep growing, to move toward move aliveness and possibility, to both soften and enliven (160)”

Within generative somatics, Haines explains that healing begins with these questions: “What do you want? What do you value? What do you long for? What is yearning to heal? What do you want to be possible for your community or for the world?” (164). These are “questions of possibility” that orient our bodies towards change. Healing from trauma is a queer utopian project that honours softness, vulnerability, desire, longing, magic, and interdependence. 188

In my largely queer, largely femme community filled with trauma BBs and sick babes, we understand the power of softness and the radical potential of interdependence for building the queer utopia that we may never see, but need to imagine. Softness isn’t just an aesthetic; it’s a political orientation towards the world that believes in our collective ability to heal.

I want a soft future. A future built by femmes, in which believing in possibility is a part of resisting, and our vulnerabilities establish hope, and so we give that out to the world. Each moment with Jonathan was an attempt at crafting future templates. Looking back on these moments of Femme4Femme intimacy, I see two bodies, both femme, both traumatized, touching one another during a pandemic. In our commitment to intimacy, in responding to the call “touch me, I’m sick,” we get that much closer to a soft future.

189

Chapter Notes

1 Name has been changed.

2 Cf. Femme: Feminists, Lesbians, and Bad Girls, Eds. Laura Harris and Elizabeth Crocker. It’s important to note that when we only understand femme identity as being tied to sexuality, we erase the trans women and non-binary femmes for whom femme identity exists outside of the narrow confines of male/female, straight/queer. I see femme “as a gender experience that is never tied to biological sex” (Rose and Camilleri 12). Femmeness can be located in gender expression (the donning of nail polish and lipstick and floral prints) but it is also a gender identity and thus might refuse to be easily indexed. Femmeness does not need to be tethered to gender, sex, or sexuality. Rather, as non-binary femmes like Alok Vaid Menon have shown me, femmeness is a way to exist in a world without gender.

3 RM Barton explains how, “Without a butch, a femme woman’s queerness is often overlooked. Other queer women may fail to read her as sufficiently queer, and—even worse—straight men may think she’s interested in them. Thus, femmes may feel like they have to continually and aggressively assert their queerness to be acknowledged by other queer people or understood by straights.”

4 As I write this, I want to name that as a white femme, I can embrace my femme identity with much greater ease than femmes of colour. According to the National Center for Transgender Equality, 7 months into 2020 and the total number of murders of transgender people has surpassed the total for 2019, with 28 dead, the majority of whom are Black trans women. Their names are: Dustin Parker, Alexa Neulisa Luciano Ruiz, Yampi Méndez Arocho, Monica Diamond, Lexi, Johanna Metzger, Penélope Díaz Ramírez, Layla Pelaez Sánchez, Serena Angelique Velázquez Ramos, Nina Pop, Helle Jae O’Regan, Tony McDade, Dominique “Rem’mie” Fells, Riah Milton, Jayne Thompson, Selena Reyes Hernandez, Brayla Stone, Merci Mack, Shaki Peters, Bree “Nuk” Black, Summer Taylor, Draya McCarty, Tatiana Hall, Marilyn Cazares, Tiffany Harris, Queasha D. Hardy, Brian “Egypt” Powers, Aja Raquell Rhone-Spears.

190

That there is a rise in the deaths of trans women at the same time as a global pandemic and the Black Lives Matter Revolution is no mere coincidence. Femmes are the original agitators. It was Marsha P. Johnson and Silvia Rivera who threw the first bricks at Stonewall and initiated the queer revolution in 1969. And it is Black femmes who’re leading the BLM movement. In offering these vignettes, I wish to express my immense gratitude to these femmes for all of the ways in which they fight for the collective liberation of all.

5 See Dana; Porges; and Rosenberg. 191

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Copyright Acknowledgements

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Permissions obtained for the following images: Karolyn Gehrig, “What is #HospitalGlam?” Karolyn Gehrig, “I continue to practice #HospitalGlam.” Karolyn Gehrig, “#HospitalGlam: Healthcare is a luxury good.” Esmé Weijun Wang, “Today I was flattened by fatigue and pain again.” Esmé Weijun Wang, “My apologies for the deluge of IV-room selfies.”

The following fall under Fair Use: Désiré Magloire Bourneville and Paul Regnard, Plate XXIV. Hystéro-Èpilepsie: Contracture, 1878, collotypes with letterpress captions. Désiré Magloire Bourneville and Paul Regnard, Plate XXIV. Attitudes Passionelles: Hallecinations De L’Ouie, 1878, collotypes with letterpress captions.