My toddler’s cough wakes me in the night — the sound has a quick attack, starting like a bark, and an abrupt end, like a choke — triggering my adrenaline. This gasp in the dark warrants a call to the pediatrician’s office. I rush into his room to get him to sit up and drink…
Category: Gender, Sex, Relationships
Thoughts on the Material Self
Dr. Brian J. Troth // February 2022. Heavy rain has drenched France’s capital; strong winds force the rain sideways and send the covid-testing tents tumbling down the road. In the Café Beaubourg, psychiatrist Dr. Christophe Fauré is working on his next book. Two months prior, I had just finished reading his first fiction, Mourir n’est…
Turning Forty and a Corner: a Storyteller’s Data Analysis on an Empathic Life Lived So Far
Cover Image: Mujer by Melissa Maldonado-Salcedo 2021. Melissa Maldonado-Salcedo // OUT OF THIS WORLD Learning that I was an empath changed my life. It wasn’t that this label gave me meaning or purpose; it just simply explained “me.” As an artist, being sensitive is celebrated and somewhat necessary to create. In academia, emotions and feelings should…
Teenagers protecting their babies
Sasheenie Moodley // In this article, I explore the ways in which teenage mothers protect their babies. This article follows my earlier pieces in Synapsis: “Teenage mother love” and “Teenagers connecting with their babies”. The way some girls protect, love, and connect with their babies is a testament to what Elisabeth Badinter (1981) has called…
Covering Up
Dr. Brian J. Troth // The Latin crudus has two meanings it bequeaths upon modern English. That which is crude can either be seen as that which is natural or that which is lacking taste. Humans have a natural state, but that state is ephemeral. As soon as the child exits the womb, it is…
Emotions as Ethnography: The Story Doctor’s Toolbox
Cover Image: My Aunts by Melissa Maldonado-Salcedo 2021. Melissa Maldonado-Salcedo// I am always “in my feelings.” I say this unapologetically, and knowing that some Latina women are rendered in popular culture as lacking control of their emotions and impulses. The overlap between these representations and my ethnographic life does not escape me. Empathy, “my gut,” memories,…
Teenagers connecting with their babies
Sasheenie Moodley // In this article, I explore what happens to teenage mothers – and the way they live their lives – after their babies are born. This article follows one of my earlier pieces in Synapsis titled “Teenage mother love.” Here, I argue that there is another dimension of teenage mothering that complements ‘mother…
Teenage mother love
Sasheenie Moodley // Some teenagers say that loving a baby means giving a baby what he needs, not what he wants. Attending to a baby’s needs is a form of mother love, protection, and care. Some teenage mothers seem to ‘delay’ love until they can overcome or reconcile the ‘mistake’ that is teenage pregnancy. In…
Intersex Erasure & the Myth of the “One True Sex”
Diana Rose Newby // My place was not marked out in this world that shunned me, that had cursed me. (Barbin 3) Content Warning: suicide, sexual abuse Herculine Barbin was twenty-one when she was forced to change her sex. Assigned female at her birth in 1838 in southwestern France, Barbin grew up identifying as such until…