Image: “L’appel du Vide,” by Danielle Wilfand (oil painting). It’s a long story. You sit in front of me, the neurology resident, face half obscured by the computer, fingers poised on the keyboard. You don’t look up. I can see the gears in your head whirring, piecing together how best to boil down my…
Category: Disability
Unfitness, Utopianism, and the Ugly Backwardness of Progressive Beauty
For the members of my inaugural class: the brilliant first-years of “Succession” When the film Black Panther, directed by Ryan Coogler, was released to that rare mix of critical and popular esteem in 2018, I knew I was supposed to like it—not just as a progressive but as a critic myself. Indeed, I did: it’s…
The Stories We Tell: Metaphor, Chronic Illness, and Self Narrative
The first time I came face to face with the metaphor of illness in a tangible form was on a weekend trip to Santa Monica Beach. I was on summer break after my Freshman year at UCLA, sprawled out in the California sun with a second-hand copy of Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies….
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,…
“Intelligence If Anything is a Handicap”: How Elizabeth Bowen Reimagined Cognitive Difference
// Early in Elizabeth Bowen’s novel Eva Trout (1968), two adults meet to discuss the strange behavior of the eponymous young protagonist: her guardian, Constantine Ormeau, put in charge of her care after the death of her father, and Iseult Arble, Eva’s former teacher with whom Constantine has placed Eva as a payed guest, until…
Rethinking “Survival of the Fittest” with Bird Box
Shortly after publishing On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin confessed, “The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me feel sick.”[1] In an increasingly austere age, the peacock tail should become all the more nauseating.[2] The genetic crime balks at the original bedfellows: natural selection and the…
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…
Admiring the Other: A Chronicle of Wonder, Part Two
In the summer of 2022, I attended the VariAbilities conference hosted by The Ringling Circus Museum in Sarasota, Florida. As a part of the program, presenters were invited to tour the museum’s extensive circus and print archive. Among these artifacts were a small collection of photo albums that featured both named and unnamed performers of…
My Pineal Prosthetic: Light Therapy and the Politics of Productivity
Our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of the spectrum…Their engineers are sun-worshipers mediating a new scientific revolution associated with the night dream of post-industrial society. –Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” I frequent a park near my apartment…
I’m not Lazy, I’m Ill
“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…