Amanda Cachia’s Hospital Aesthetics: Disability, Medicine, Activism was published by Manchester University Press last September. Cachia is a curator and art historian with a joint appointment as Professor of Practice in Museum Studies at the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University, where she is also Affiliate Faculty in Disability Studies….
Author: Merve Şen
Homemade Remedies and DIY Care in The Flame Alphabet
“I think of language as being tremendously potent. It causes deep feelings in us, so much so that its effects would seem nearly chemical, medical.” In his interview with journalist Adam Boretz for The Millions, author Ben Marcus explained the genesis of his 2012 novel The Flame Alphabet with the words above. Imagining language as…
The Rupture of Silence: The Body, Language, and The Power Dynamics in Health with Monica Ong
In “The Vulnerable and the Political,” Estelle Ferrarese talks about the affinity between care and the management of vulnerability. Both become political as they pertain to individual and social bodies. “The distribution of care,” Ferrarese says, “depends on patterns of domination and historical organizations that may stem from the sedimentation of gendered roles…” (237). Social…
Care as a Living Terrain in My Body
“Shared bacterial compositions can do wonders for communality.” The words are ringing in my ears. I wear a headset, which has been worn by dozens of others before me. An invisible mouth has been whispering to us all. So, are we part of the same community? Before stepping into “The Operation Room,” a small gallery…
Sutures of Photography
A crowded family photo (cover image). Rather a strange one though. People are nowhere to be seen as men replaced by specimen and each are clothed in jars.[1] The photo comes from a medical album that documents the surgical achievements in Haseki Nisa Hastanesi [Haseki Women’s Hospital] in Istanbul during the 1890s. The jars contain…
X-ray Retouched: Medical Visualities in Barbara Hammer’s Sanctus
Flesh and bone, bodily hair, tissues, liquids, skin and nerves. For the experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer (1939-2019), a pioneer in the disruption of heteronormative cinema, the body became a matter of experience and experiment throughout her life. As a person who dedicated her life to making “invisible bodies and histories visible” (Hammer 2010), Hammer attended…
Book Review: Caring Visualities, or Visualizing Care in Fixing Images
“Koat phey khmaoch, châng moel’ (she is afraid of ghosts, so she wants to look), he said to me, not turning from his typing… The ward is not specialized in ghosts (there are other experts for those beings), yet doctors and nurses understood that patients might connect pain or a dream with a supernatural intervention…