“I am not Lazy; I’m Ill”* Multiple sclerosis can feel like your body is gaslighting you. In high-stress mode, I lift my hands in front of my face to check if they are shaking. In Latino culture, we have a saying, “no me tiemba el pulso.” The literal translation is, “My pulse does not tremble.”…
Category: Disability
Desiring Difference: A Chronicle of Wonder, Part One
Desiring Difference: A Chronicle of Wonder, Part One “I get glimpses of the horror of normalcy. Each of these innocents on the streets is engulfed by a terror of their own ordinariness. They would do anything to be unique.” –Geek Love by Katherine Dunn Over the last week and half, I’ve been teaching Katherine Dunn’s…
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…
Walking Steadily Once Again: Miracles, Biblical Epic, and the Heroics of Healing
A man who isn’t simply blind but speechless and possessed (Matt. 12.22-3); a paralytic who’s prostrate by an inaccessible fountain (John 1-15); someone who’s sightless, his eyes spat on and caked with mud (John 9.1-12): all three walk not into a bar but back to their homes, to tell of a healer named Jesus. I…
Ethnographically Capturing the Autoimmune: Textures and Surplus
Ethnographically Capturing the Autoimmune: Textures and Surplus My New Year resolves to avoid fitting in within academic circles that reductively evaluate and lazily quantify my professional and personal contributions. I am tired of defending: my dissertation, my philosophies, and, ultimately, myself. Mentors and elders have confessed that the purpose of academic hazing is to…
In and On the Clinic
All of my previous trips to our nearby hospital have been marked by blood and bruises. As an especially clumsy individual, I’m used to squeezing paper towels tightly around gashed fingers or pressing ice compresses to a purpling forehead, blinking with the unfocused eyes of someone definitively concussed. Accompanied by my wonderful partner, I am…
Black and Beautiful, Smoke and Mirrors: The Freed One’s Granddaughter Wears a Crown
Facing down the barrel at the end of my reproductive year, the advent of menopause amplified my embodied differences.
Reframing the Cultural Clash: A Literary, Disability Studies Reading of “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down”
Anne Fadiman’s 1997 bestselling narrative nonfiction, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures, meticulously outlines the story of Lia Lee. Lia was a young Laotian refugee diagnosed with and unsuccessfully treated for severe epilepsy over the course of her childhood in California…
The Head of a Dog or Horn of a Rhino: Meaning, Milton, and Me
THE HEAD OF A DOG OR HORN OF A RHINO: MEANING, MILTON, & ME [H]e reproaches me with want of beauty and loss of sight: “A monster huge and hideous, void of sight.” … [B]ut he immediately corrects himself, and says, “though not indeed huge, for there cannot be a more spare, shrivelled and bloodless…
Aversion to Aging: Futuristic Science Fiction and Ageism
Science fiction, a genre known for its extrapolations into the future, seem Science fiction. For a genre that is known for its seemingly equitable futures, it sure seems to take issue with age and aging. Indeed, disability studies scholar Alison Kafer notes that “Whenever I tell people I have been working on a book about…