DOCSLIB.ORG

{PDF EPUB} a Body Undone Living on After Great Pain by Christina Crosby a Body Undone: Living on After Great Pain by Christina Crosby

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
{PDF EPUB} a Body Undone Living on After Great Pain by Christina Crosby a Body Undone: Living on After Great Pain by Christina Crosby Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} A Body Undone Living on After Great Pain by Christina Crosby A Body Undone: Living on After Great Pain by Christina Crosby. Completing the CAPTCHA proves you are a human and gives you temporary access to the web property. What can I do to prevent this in the future? If you are on a personal connection, like at home, you can run an anti-virus scan on your device to make sure it is not infected with malware. If you are at an office or shared network, you can ask the network administrator to run a scan across the network looking for misconfigured or infected devices. Another way to prevent getting this page in the future is to use Privacy Pass. You may need to download version 2.0 now from the Chrome Web Store. Cloudflare Ray ID: 6605c6b41bd3323c • Your IP : 116.202.236.252 • Performance & security by Cloudflare. A Body Undone: Living on After Great Pain by Christina Crosby. Our systems have detected unusual traffic activity from your network. Please complete this reCAPTCHA to demonstrate that it's you making the requests and not a robot. If you are having trouble seeing or completing this challenge, this page may help. If you continue to experience issues, you can contact JSTOR support. Block Reference: #c961e830-cec8-11eb-994c-3d6ed1e259e0 VID: #(null) IP: 116.202.236.252 Date and time: Wed, 16 Jun 2021 17:32:13 GMT. CHRISTINA CROSBY: “A BODY, UNDONE” Christina Crosby is a feminist, a lesbian, and a scholar of gender and sexuality, but the concept of embodiment—what it means to be in and of one’s body—was not just something she thought about, but something she lived . As a child in rural Pennsylvania, she played, strong and coordinated, alongside her brother and competed fiercely with him—she even sometimes imagined herself his twin. In high school and college, she played field hockey and basketball, and began running after she graduated in 1974. At age 40, she turned to biking, and the year she turned 50 was hoping to reach over 1,000 miles, riding spring through fall. She reveled in the muscular body created through a lifetime of sport, and took pleasure in choosing tight leather pants and a silky sleeveless top when stepping out of an evening. “Embodied life was then an affirmation of fully realized pleasures integrated with a rich intellectual life,” she writes. Mobility is just one issued faced by those with damage to the central nervous system, says Professor of English Christina Crosby. Photo by John Van Vlack. All that came crashing to a halt on October 1, 2003. As the Wesleyan English professor rode her bicycle in the dimming light that evening, a fallen branch caught in the spokes of her wheel just as she crested a hill, flinging the bike sideways. Crosby’s chin hit the pavement, which both smashed her face and broke her neck, leaving her with “quadri-plegia”—the medical definition for paralysis below the shoulders that involves all four limbs. Because her spinal cord was scraped, not severed (making the injury “incomplete”), she has recovered weak but functional arm strength and limited use of her hands. Suddenly hers was—as the title of her newly released memoir says— A Body, Undone . An accomplished writer and a lover of prose, who urges her students to use language precisely, Crosby found herself struggling for words to explain her body and her life. She writes: “How was I to describe this pain, lost in a body so foreign to me I would translate it into speech in only the most primitive way?” But over the years since Crosby’s accident, the words have come and gathered into a memoir. The book is a series of direct and revealing essays that tell a story of pain and grief, but also of passionate love, the support of a vibrant community, and her driving desire to live. Crosby brings all of her gifts to bear—a brilliant mind, an unflinching ability to analyze and report on her physical life, including even the “bowel program” necessitated by compromised bowels, her love of sex both before and after the accident, and the frustration of trying to connect with her much-loved dog when she came home in a wheelchair that scared poor Babe. Crosby’s story starts in rural Penn-sylvania, where her father was a professor at Juniata College, a small liberal arts school run by the Church of the Brethren. She went on to undergraduate work at Swarthmore College before earning a PhD in English at Brown University. Crosby landed at Wesleyan in 1982. By the time of her crash, she was the chair of the faculty, preparing for a meeting with the trustees. She had published a book on Victorian society and “the woman question,” and had won a major teaching award. In her office one of the only wall hangings is the certificate from that honor. In the six years before the accident, Crosby had been in a relationship with Janet Jakobsen, a Barnard College professor of women’s, gender and sexuality studies and the director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women. Their love remains a defining force in Crosby’s life today and continues to sustain her. When Crosby awoke from sedation after the accident to find herself paralyzed, a cruel fate decreed that she knew better than most what that meant. Her beloved only sibling Jeff had been living with multiple sclerosis for decades at the time of her accident. Crosby had watched his erect, handsome body change over time. First he used a cane, and then a convenient, light, folding wheelchair. Then, as he lost arm function, he needed a power chair. First he sat up straight, but gradually slumped forward as muscles in his midsection wasted away. By the time she broke her neck, Jeff was already quadriplegic. “In an instant,” Crosby writes, “at the symbolic age of 50 . my childhood fantasy of being his twin seemed malevolently realized.” But, no. Jeff’s body continued to fail. He lived long enough for the siblings to sit side-by-side in their wheelchairs, and to exchange emails about bodily functions—a conversation Crosby never imagined she would have with her brother. He died in 2010. Crosby, like her brother before her, found joy and connection in the support of a loving community. In a culture where we like to see ourselves as independent, self-sufficient, Crosby insists on interdependence. The necessity of the support of people from Wesleyan, both in the immediate aftermath of her accident and in the years since, is clearly detailed in the book. At the time of the crash, Jakobsen was in New York. On the train ride north she worried that her love lay suffering alone. But when she arrived at Hartford Hospital she found Wesleyan’s then-president Doug Bennet and his wife, Midge, in the waiting room. Crosby writes, quoting Midge, “We’ve been able to see her. They asked, ‘Are you her parents?’ and I just lied.” At that, Jakobsen burst into tears. The couple would be sustained by the love of the whole Wesleyan community—so importantly represented by Doug and Midge at the moment of crisis—through meals, rides to therapy, and good wishes through the two full years of rehabilitation required before Crosby could return to work half-time. Even so many years since her accident, help continues to be crucial. Simple chores—going to the departmental office in the building next door to collect your mail—take on a different level of challenge when one must negotiate multiple floors, elevators, and tight turns in a wheelchair. Margaret Neale adds three hours a week to her full-time job in the Office of Financial Aid to help Crosby prepare for classes and manage the details of a complex life. Liz Tinker, administrative assistant in the English Department, will bring Crosby her mail rather than having her go from one building to another. If the ramp on the specially modified van Crosby drives fails to go up or down, it is often Tinker who goes outside (in the rain, of course) to help Crosby get to where she needs to go. But Tinker is quick to say that Crosby doesn’t complain. “She has so inspired me in how she has dealt with this incredible tragedy that would put anyone else to. .” Tinker’s voice trails off as she struggles for the right word. “She is so insistent on doing everything possible by herself. She hates to ask for help, but also relies on us when she needs to. There is nothing that I or anyone else in the department wouldn’t do for her.” During a recent interview in her office, both Crosby’s continuing challenges and the progress she has made since the initial injury are obvious. Dressed in all black (“Maybe I am in permanent mourning,” she writes.), but for a bright scarf and geometric earrings, she has mobility in her arms such that she can gesture as she speaks. But her hands are slightly gnarled in on themselves and she writes by using voice recognition software. One might wonder why Crosby has chosen to tell the story. Why dig deeply into intimate bodily functions and excruciating pain? In a way the book reads almost as therapy, exploring impossible-to-solve dilemmas and outright contradictions. Immediately after the accident, for example, Crosby tells us that Jakobsen reported to their friends that she had “suffered no loss of [her] ‘personhood,’’’ but Crosby nonetheless feels alien, even unrecognizable, because, she says, “My sense of a coherent self has been so deeply affronted.” Her 50 years of life before the accident and her desire to remember the bodymind she so long had mean that “forgetting is impossible,” yet she also recognizes that “forgetting is also imperiously necessary.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Seeking Intersections of Pain, Grief and Disability by Christina Crosby, Phd
    JHR NARRATIVE REFLECTION “We are looking for positives here”: Seeking Intersections of Pain, Grief and Disability By Christina Crosby, PhD Three weeks after my fiftieth birthday, I broke my neuropathic pain and deep grief for all I’d lost. fifth and sixth cervical vertebrae in a cycling accident. Weekly meetings of the team, which included Janet A branch got caught in my spokes and instantly threw and me, assured me that each knew what the others me to the side, so fast I had no time to throw out my were doing, and all were concentrated on treating me. hands. My chin took the full impact, smashing my I now enjoy a manifestly abundant life. I work half face and hyper- extending my neck. Anyone who time at a job I love, and I enjoy the friendship of works in rehabilitative medicine knows something of many. My lover then still loves me now, and between the far-reaching effects of spinal cord injury. Every us we have enough money to pay directly for all the person so paralyzed will live with deficits and help I need, while so many have no such advantage. capabilities specific to which neural networks are Yet physical pain, though moderated by drugs, destroyed or compromised, so each case will pose shadows every day, and fourteen years after the different challenges for rehabilitative treatment. Each accident, I am not done with grieving. person must use whatever resources are at hand to understand a bodymind radically undone. I have worked for more than thirty years at Wesleyan University as a Professor of feminist, gender, and “We are looking for positives here,” Dr.
    [Show full text]
  • 2014-2015 FGSS Newsletter
    FEMINIST GENDER WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY FEMINIST, GENDER AND SEXUALITYSEXUALITY STUDIES STUDIES Inside: Letter from 2the Chair Senior 3Theses Diane Social Death Weiss ’80 4Series Faculty & Memorial 6Alumni News Ecofeminism Lecture Grant On the evening of April 9, 2015, Elizabeth data, and extract gain for feminist theory. At order to 7 Wilson presented her most recent work as the the Diane Weiss lecture, Wilson focused on render them FGSS featured speaker for the 27th Annual Diane re-conceptualizing depression and anger. She deserving Weiss ’80 Memorial Lecture. Her presentation, contrasted her account with both Freud’s theory of sympathy Symposia “Bitter Melancholy: Feminism and the Politics of on melancholy, and feminist treatments of and justice. 8 Biology and Aggression,” explored depression depression. In Freudian and feminist theories “If we are and aggression through a feminist framework. of depression, anger is turned inwards. Wilson unable to keep our conceptual focus on these The talk aimed to reclaim the hostility that may argues that recognizing the outward expression intensely hostile forces, then our politics become underlie depression as a positive resource, and of anger, or aggression, in melancholia renders redemptive, sadism is tamed, culture is salvaged, also to rethink feminist responses to melancholy the melancholic a more active subject. and politics marches on to the good,” Wilson and depression. said. Wilson argued that feminist thought has elided The lecture series is named after Diane Weiss or ignored aggression enacted by victimized During the question and answer portion of the (’80). Professor Victoria Pitts-Taylor introduced subjects. She used as a case study the murder evening, Wilson also contested neuropsychiatric the lecture by sharing some background on of Lawrence (Leticia) King, a gender atypical accounts of depression that reduce it to brain Weiss, who tragically died soon after receiving student from Oxnard, California who was shot processes.
    [Show full text]
  • LEON J. HILTON CURRICULUM VITAE Department of Theatre Arts & Performance Studies · Brown University Lyman Hall 010 · 83 Waterman St
    Updated: March 2021 LEON J. HILTON CURRICULUM VITAE Department of Theatre Arts & Performance Studies · Brown University Lyman Hall 010 · 83 Waterman St. Box 1897 · Providence, RI 02912 cell: (847) 644-8819 · office: (401) 863-6952 · fax: (401) 863-7529 [email protected] ACADEMIC APPOINTMENTS 2017-present Brown University · Providence, RI Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies Affiliations: Gender and Sexuality Studies Program; Science and Technology Studies Program 2016-2017. University of Pennsylvania · Philadelphia, PA Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities, Penn Humanities Forum Affiliations: Department of English; Cinema Studies Program EDUCATION 2010-2016. New York University · New York, NY Ph.D. (with Distinction), Department of Performance Studies Dissertation: “Minding Otherwise: Autism, Performance, and the Politics of Neurological Difference” Committee: José Esteban Muñoz & Tavia Nyong’o (chairs), Faye Ginsburg, André Lepecki, Heather K. Love, Karen Shimakawa 2009-2010. New York University · New York, NY M.A., Department of Performance Studies 2003-2007. Wesleyan University · Middletown, CT B.A. (with High Hons.), College of Letters PUBLICATIONS BOOK MANUSCRIPT Feral Performatives. University of Minnesota Press (Under Contract: publication expected 2022). PEER-REVIEWED JOURNAL ARTICLES 2020. “The Real End of a Nightmare: Amateurism, Feminism, and the Politics of Therapy in Jane Arden’s 1970s.” Third Text, special issue on “Amateurism and the Arts,” edited by Julia Bryan-Wilson and Benjamin D. Piekut. Vol. 33, Issue 5. 2018. “The Bright Shapes Were Going: Disability, Neurodivergence, and Theatrical Form in Elevator Repair Service’s The Sound and the Fury.” The Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, “Drama, Theatrical Performance, and Disability,” edited by Carrie Sandahl and Ann Fox.
    [Show full text]
  • FIGURES of FINANCE CAPITALISM Writing, Class, and Capital in the Age of Dickens
    LITERARY CRITICISM AND CULTURAL THEORY OUTSTANDING DISSERTATIONS Edited by William E.Cain Professor of English Wellesley College A ROUTLEDGE SERIES LITERARY CRITICISM AND CULTURAL THEORY WILLIAM E.CAIN, General Editor EUGENIC FANTASIES Racial Ideology in the Literature and Popular Culture of the 1920s Betsy L.Nies THE LIFE WRITINGS OF OTHERNESS Woolf, Baldwin, Kingston, and Winterson Lauren Rusk FROM WITHIN THE FRAME Storytelling in African-American Fiction Bertram D. Ashe THE SELF WIRED Technology and Subjectivity in Contemporary Narrative Lisa Yaszek THE SPACE AND PLACE OF MODERNISM The Little Magazine in New York Adam McKible THE FIGURE OF CONSCIOUSNESS William James, Henry James, and Edith Wharton Jill M.Kress WORD OF MOUTH Food and Fiction after Freud Susanne Skubal THE WASTE FIX Seizures of the Sacred from Upton Sinclair to the Sopranos William G.Little WlLL THE ClRCLE BE UNBROKEN? Family and Sectionalism in the Virginia Novels of Kennedy, Caruthers, and Tucker, 1830–1845 John L.Hare POETIC GESTURE Myth, Wallace Stevens, and the Motions of Poetic Language Kristine S.Santilli BORDER MODERNISM Intercultural Readings in American Literary Modernism Christopher Schedler THE MERCHANT OF MODERNISM The Economic few in Anglo-American Literature, 1864–1939 Gary Martin Levine THE MAKING OF THE VICTORIAN NOVELIST Anxieties of Authorship in the Mass Market Bradley Deane OUT OF TOUCH Skin Tropes and Identities in Woolf, Ellison, Pynchon, and Acker Maureen F.Curtin WRITING THE CITY Urban Visions and Literary Modernism Desmond Harding FIGURES OF FINANCE CAPITALISM Writing, Class, and Capital in the Age of Dickens Borislav Knezevic Routledge New York & London Published in 2003 by Routledge 29 West 35th Street New York, NY 10001 www.routledge-ny.com Published in Great Britain by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane London EC4P 4EE www.routledge.co.uk Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
    [Show full text]
  • Victorian Negotiations with the Recent Past: History, Fiction, Utopia
    Victorian Negotiations with the Recent Past: History, Fiction, Utopia Helen Kingstone Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Leeds Leeds Trinity University Department of Humanities September 2013 The candidate confirms that the work submitted is her own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. © 2013 The University of Leeds and Helen Kingstone The right of Helen Kingstone to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Acknowledgements Most obvious and important thanks go to my supervisors, Rosemary Mitchell and Nathan Uglow at Leeds Trinity University, and Richard Salmon at the University of Leeds, for their generous, patient and encouraging support, without which this thesis certainly would not have reached completion. Particular thanks to Rosemary for her generosity with her time, her ideas and her collection of highly relevant books. This thesis would also not have come into being without the intellectually exciting and collaboratively supportive training I received during my MA studies at York. I owe a great deal to Jane Moody, who got me there, and who was always an inspiration. She is much missed. Trev Broughton was incisively insightful as my dissertation supervisor, but her help has not stopped there, and I am very grateful to her for voluntarily applying her critical eye to my opening chapter at a difficult stage.
    [Show full text]
  • A Body, Undone: Christina Crosby
    1 A Body, Undone: Living On after Great Pain Christina Crosby NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS New York and London {~?~ST: end chapter} 2 {~?~ST: begin chapter} NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS New York and London www.nyupress.org © 2016 by New York University All rights reserved References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. CIP tk New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books. Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Also available as an ebook {~?~ST: end chapter} 3 1 Your Puny, Vulnerable Self On October 1, 2003, I caught a branch in the spokes of the front wheel of my bicycle, and hurtled toward the pavement. My chin took the full force of the blow, which smashed my face and broke the fifth and sixth cervical vertebrae in my neck. The broken bone scraped my spinal cord, and in an instant I was paralyzed. There’s no knowing right away exactly what impairments will result from a spinal cord injury, but as the days passed, it became clear that I had lost the use not only of my leg muscles, but also the muscles of my torso, arms, and hands, and that the loss of muscle compromised my body’s circulatory systems.
    [Show full text]
  • Cross-Cultural Encounter and the Novel: Nation, Identity, and Genre in Nineteenth- Century British Literature
    CROSS-CULTURAL ENCOUNTER AND THE NOVEL: NATION, IDENTITY, AND GENRE IN NINETEENTH- CENTURY BRITISH LITERATURE DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Chimi Woo, M.A. * * * * * The Ohio State University 2008 Dissertation Committee: Approved by Professor Clare Simmons, Adviser Professor David Riede ____________________________ Adviser Professor Amanpal Garcha Graduate Program in English ABSTRACT My dissertation considers cross-cultural encounter represented in the nineteenth- century novel by focusing on the relationships between England’s imperial nationalism and the novel. Whereas many postcolonial critics have situated the nineteenth-century novelistic process in the national context of English colonialism and have argued that the novel mainly sustained the hegemonic mode of conceptualization of England’s cultural others, I argue that the story of cross-cultural encounters conceives an alternative vision that counters such a hegemonic conceptualization of English subjectivity and its subordinate otherness. The notion of cross-cultural encounter in my project is differentiated from that of the space of colonial encounter through which the colonizer from the metropolis seeks to assert his superiority and secure his innocence while he is involved with colonial practices. On the contrary, English characters in the texts that I consider experience the sense of guilt, ennui, or uncertainty that is frequently attributed to colonized subjects. Through actual encounter with their cultural others, English characters distance themselves from the dominant cultural order and the imperialist assumptions as to their superiority and engage with other cultures and people. I show how novels suggest the disruption of the claimed cultural hierarchy by addressing the positive alterity of other ii cultures and hybridity that the dynamics of cross-cultural encounter invoke.
    [Show full text]
  • The Ends of History
    ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS: WOMEN’S HISTORY THE ENDS OF HISTORY THE ENDS OF HISTORY Victorians and “The Woman Question” CHRISTINA CROSBY Volume 11 First published in 1991 This edition first published in 2013 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 1991 Christina Crosby All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-0-415-53409-3 (Set) eISBN: 978-0-203-10425-5 (Set) ISBN: 978-0-415-62304-9 (Volume 11) eISBN: 978-0-203-10412-5 (Volume 11) Publisher’s Note The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent. Disclaimer The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and would welcome correspondence from those they have been unable to trace. The Ends of History Victorians and ''The Woman Question'' Christina Crosby New York and London First published 1991 by Routledge a division of Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc.
    [Show full text]
  • Bcrw Spring 2015 Events
    STUDENT-INITIATED EVENT LUNCHTIME LECTURE NATALIE BOYMEL KAMPEN MEMORIAL LECTURE CARIBBEAN FEMINISMS THE BARNARD-COLUMBIA LOVE AND FLAMES IN FEMINIST CRITICISM AND HISTORY ON THE PAGE BLUES SYMPOSIUM Legacies of Black Queer and WITHOUT THE COVER OF LAW With Jamaica Kincaid, Tiphanie Prison Abolitionist Solidarity Writing the History of Enslaved Women Yanique, Kaiama Glover Friday, 02/13–Saturday, 02/14 with Palestinian Struggle By Annette Gordon-Reed Barnard Campus By Che Gossett Thursday, 04/16 6:30 PM Tuesday, 03/24 6:30 PM Event Oval, The Diana Center This weekend-long series of panel Wednesday, 02/11 12 PM Event Oval, The Diana Center discussions and listening sessions BCRW, 101 Barnard Hall Distinguished writer Jamaica engages with the musical Drawing on her work about slavery at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, Kincaid and debut novelist origins and cultural importance In this lecture, new BCRW luminary legal historian Annette Gordon-Reed will discuss the way law Tiphanie Yanique come together of the great American art form: Community Archivist and influences the portrayal of enslaved women and their families. Annette with Barnard’s Kaiama Glover the blues. By grounding the Student Coordinator Che Gordon-Reed is the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe to discuss their experiences as conversation in the music and the Gossett examines the legacies Institute for Advanced Study, the Charles Warren Professor of American women of color writers from the experiences of those who made it, of Black queer solidarity with the Legal History at Harvard Law School, and a Professor of History at Harvard Caribbean and their thoughts this symposium seeks to question Palestinian struggle, excavating University.
    [Show full text]