X-ray Retouched: Medical Visualities in Barbara Hammer’s Sanctus

Flesh and bone, bodily hair, tissues, liquids, skin and nerve. 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 dedicates her life to making “invisible bodies and histories visible” (Hammer 2010), Hammer did not…

the dear asughara series: part one

[ This experimental essay series is a poetic response to Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater, an autobiographical novel about a Nigerian girl who struggles with spiritual gifts, multiple selves, madness, and trauma that lead her into and out of self destruction. Freshwater ruptures Western notions of mental illness and honors the metaphysical realities of young women across…

Sound(e)scaping Complex PTSD: The Self-Saboteur’s Memory

    I temporarily lost my hearing a few months ago. Despite the world coming through in whispers, I learned I only see the world clearly through sound. I would not call this ability synesthesia, but it would make sense, like many other clinical terms, when applied to my life. I have tended to get…

Chinatown Poem

  —   “Chinatown Poem” is an original cento written using language taken from billboards, commercial shop signs, advertisements, and other elements of the linguistic landscape of Boston’s Chinatown neighborhood. The poem explores Chinatown as both a site of diasporic cultural production and a space where racist tropes and stereotypes about Asian people circulate and…

Where’s My Arc? Rewriting the Wellness Together Narrative

1: Setting the plot   After logging into the Canadian Government’s Wellness Together portal and completing your initial assessment, a “progress graph” materializes. The graph marks three points of departure: “mood,” “well-being,” and “functioning.” If you obey the email prompts and periodically rate, on a scale from one to five, the frequency of thoughts of self-harm,…

Lending the Body: Reflections on Performance and Sharing Pain

As we all entered the space and settled into our seats, Ruchi, covered in an oversized red cloth, stood frozen in the middle of the stage. A spotlight blacked out the rest of the intimate performance venue. The audience was separated from the performer only by a few feet. For ten minutes, Ruchi stood without…

Representations and Discourses of Indochinese and North African Women in French Colonial Postcards (1880s-1920s), Part I

In the opening of his influential book Orientalism, Edward Saïd exposed the dominance and hegemony of Western authors and artists in shaping and formulating the fundamental narratives about the ‘Orient’, emphasizing the binary and self-consolidating character of colonial discourse: A very large mass of writers, among whom are poets, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists, and…

A Few Pages for a Life: Self-Portrait Through A Health Record Booklet

“It overflows with loose pages: medical prescriptions all mixed up, from my teenage to my adult years, from benign afflictions to serious troubles. All of those scattered fragments compose an anxious being. Rashes, panic attacks, chronic diarrhea. Nothing really changes, nothing really ever gets better. With slight variations, the same medication names come up again and again. 2005, 2013, 2021.”