The haunting image captured of a child in 1984 by Rohu Rai titled “Burial of Unknown Child” in the rubble of the Bhopal industrial disaster mirrors Animal, the protagonist of Indra Sinha’s novel Animal’s People, a fictionalized account of the incident. Although Sinha doesn’t directly reference this haunting image, the resemblance is uncanny. The image…
Category: Uncategorized
Are These “Truths” Self-Evident: An Unsettling of the Terms That Define Us Part I
Human is not a neutral term. It is laced with socio-historical positionality that masquerades as neutral, universal, and even innocuous. What exactly do we mean when we invoke terms like human, humanity, or any other derivative? Suppose humanity is, in fact, universal, neutral, and innocuous. Why can people be rendered inhumane, commit crimes against humanity,…
The Threat of a Bad Gay Past: Queer Temporalities in The Miseducation of Cameron Post
The Miseducation of Cameron Post (Desiree Akhavan, 2018) tells the story of Cameron (Chloe Grace Moretz), a teenage girl sent to a Christian conversion therapy boarding school after her boyfriend discovers her with another girl on prom night. Cameron’s devout aunt panics after the revelation and sends her to God’s Promise to be cured of…
Feeling Boredom in Short Sentences: A review of “Infinite Life”
When the sick rule the world, mortality will be sexy. When the sick rule the world, all writing will be short and succinct, no paragraphs will be longer than two sentences so we can comprehend them through the brain fog the well bring to us daily. Dodie Bellamy, When the Sick Rule the World, 36….
“Venereal Peril”: ‘Controlled’ Prostitution and French Regulationism Before 1945
The rise of “le péril vénérien” and the French regulationist system Venereal diseases were a significant social and medical problem through the mid-20th century. While syphilis had a long history, with its emergence in Europe around 1495 (Tognotti 2009), apprehensions surrounding venereal diseases didn’t surface until much later. Initially, these concerns were primarily directed at…
Memories of “Literature, Medicine & Memory: A Symposium in Memory of Dr. Carol Donley”
For many, the medical humanities’ origin story is set on a hill in northeast Ohio. As early as 1985, Hiram College’s Dr. Carol Cram Donley, a professor of English, spearheaded a collaboration between the small, rural liberal arts college and Northeast Ohio University College of Medicine (now Northeast Ohio Medical University), working in collaboration with…
Opening the Japanese Body
How did Japanese people view organs and body? How do you view the inside of your body?
On Queer Equity and Eugenics: The Question of In Vitro Gametogenesis
As NPR recently reported, scientists may be on the verge of succeeding at a procedure called In Vitro Gametogenesis (often shorthanded as IVG). IVG allows for the fertilization of eggs and sperm in a laboratory. These fertilized embryos could in theory carry any genes. Enthusiasm at the prospect of IVG for humans followed the procedure’s…
To Our Dearly Departed: Intimacy and Grief
As a poet, writing a poem is one of my ways of being in the world, and certainly one of my most effective ways of dealing with complicated emotions. My brother died of metastatic colorectal cancer in early June 2019. Since his death, I have charted time in terms of his death: there is before…
Inequities in Labor: Sports, Slavery, and Imperiled Pregnancies
Sara Press// Two months ago, an American Olympic athlete named Torie Bowie died alone at home during childbirth.[1] The track star’s autopsy report states that Bowie died due to “complications from respiratory distress and eclampsia,” the latter condition being linked to “high blood pressure during pregnancy.”[2] High blood pressure levels have frequently been associated with…