The prologue to Invisible Labor tells the story of author Rachel Somerstein’s cesarean section. After her labor stalled, Somerstein was asked to consent to a surgical birth after more than a whole day in labor. She agreed and the procedure began. From there, the situation deteriorated. Somerstein had a faulty epidural and she could feel…
Category: Book Reviews
Towards an Asian American Disability Politics: On Mimi Khúc’s “Dear Elia”
Sami Schalk, in Black Disability Politics (2022), notes “the limited scholarly work on the specific approaches to disability politics within particular racialized communities thus far” (162). Schalk explains that the lack of such scholarly work prevents her from exploring to what extent a Black disability politics overlaps with the disability politics of Indigenous and Native,…
Giving Us A Line: Chaos, Illness, and Max Ritvo’s “The Senses.”
For some time now, I’ve been thinking about the limitations of the chaos narrative as it relates to illness illustrated in Arthur Frank’s The Wounded Storyteller. I’ve looked at how favoring alternate narrative structures over the traditional arc might lead to meaning-making of these so-called anti-narratives. Furthering the idea that we can give chaos…
Witness and Care in Rob Delaney’s A Heart That Works
A year ago, I found myself sobbing in my kitchen at Rob Delaney’s direction. I was one chapter into A Heart That Works, Delaney’s memoir about the illness and death from brain cancer of his two-year-old son, Henry. As both an avid fan of Delaney’s Amazon television series Catastrophe and a health humanities educator who…
Book Review: I Cannot Control Everything Forever by Emily Bloom
Spidersilk Towards the end of her memoir, I Cannot Control Everything Forever, Emily Bloom evokes the image of a spider as a way to reflect upon the duality of motherhood. Moving from Ovid’s myth of Arachne through Louise Bourgeois’ giant spider sculpture “Mother of All,” Bloom lands on an investigation into how spiders in nature…
“Care is a necessity… & a very malleable term”: In conversation with Maurice Hamington
Care is a situation-driven polysemantic term. Acclimatizing to different contexts, like a shape-shifter, it interacts with the corporeal world in diverse ways. Although the type of care required varies with the context, the need for care remains constant. In this interview with Professor Maurice Hamington, conducted via a chain of emails in April 2024, we…
Book Review: Entry Points into Serious Illness and Facial Disfigurement through Kathleen Watt’s “Rearranged”
“Don’t be afraid of the blood and guts,” Kathleen Watt smiled while signing a copy of her book: “there are many entry points.” Watt, a former New York City opera singer, was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive cancer that initially filled the space behind her right cheekbone and continued to spread—“occupying the space where…
Review: Standing in the Forest of Being Alive
When Katie Farris’s Standing in the Forest of Being Alive was published by Alice James Press last year, I couldn’t put it down—and after I finished reading through it, I didn’t want to put it down. I kept it in my car as I drove to the National Institutes of Health for a bioethics fellowship;…
“On Learning to Heal” through the unknown
Cohen, Ed. On Learning to Heal: Or, What Medicine Doesn’t Know (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2023). On Learning to Heal is scholar Ed Cohen’s lived history of Crohn’s Disease, which he was diagnosed with as a teenager. The narrative is generated by two distinctions that guide his emotional-intellectual reflections of this experience: between…
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…